Over a decade ago, Nanny planted some nectarine pits in a big tub in which Pop-Pop was growing a tomato plant. The pits sprouted, and she moved them to the yard, where they grew like weeds. About three years ago, the trees started producing fruit, but the fruit was not nectarines. It looked more like little brown apples. The skin on the fruit is a bit rough, like Asian pears.
This year, the trees are LOADED with these little brown apples. When I went to the garden Friday afternoon, Nanny (who has been calling the fruit "crabapples") said she was going to make jelly out of them. I came home and did some googling and concluded that this fruit is NOT crabapples. I went back to her yard yesterday morning and snapped some pictures of the foliage and the fruit, intending to post them in a FB gardening group to see if anyone knew what kind of trees these are and if the fruit is edible.
As I passed by the shop on my way home, I heard some banging, and I poked my head inside to see what was going on. Nanny was in there disassembling a weedeater on wheels - you know, the kind that operates like a lawnmower. She bought this thing at a yard sale for $20 many years ago, but it played out last year, and she has been grieving over it ever since. By the time I arrived, she'd removed the pull-crank and was trying to get the hood off. The bolts wouldn't come loose. I said, "Nanny, I think you're turning them the wrong way. 'Lefty-Lucy, righty-tighty.'" She insisted that she was not.
She was.
We got the hood off and she dusted the inside of the fly wheel with a cosmetic brush. We sprayed lubricant under the fly wheel and cleaned some other toothy parts. We dumped out the old oil and reassembled the thing, but we could not test it because she didn't have any new oil. While she went to the store for oil and gas, I came home and uploaded my pictures to the gardening page.
The Husband was working in our yard by this time, cutting limbs off the trees along the road bank so that we can see how to get out of the driveway. When he finished, I enlisted his help in weed-eating the phlox beds, which had grown into a thick, scary jungle. We hauled four or five big wagon-loads of debris to the woods.
After that, I went back to Nanny's to mow her yard. I'd finished the yard and was mowing the edges of her long driveway when the lawnmower ran out of gas. I was closer to my house than to hers, but I wasn't sure if we had any gas in our gas can, so I walked back to the shop to get the big gas can that we keep down there. Nanny had just filled it, and I wasn't about to lug that heavy thing all the way down the driveway, so I put it on a wagon and pulled it to where the lawnmower was. As luck would have it, the gas cap on the lawnmower was next to a barbed-wire fence, and I had to push the lawnmower to the center of the driveway to give me enough room to work without being shredded by the barbs. The gas can was full to the rim, and heavy, and I spilled a good bit of gas onto the lawnmower deck before I finally got some in the tank. I finished mowing the driveway and towed the wagon back to the shop, where Nanny was about to fill her weedeater with oil and gas.
About this time, my son showed up. He helped us put the oil and gas in the weedeater and tried to crank it. Nothing. He said maybe it was the spark plug, but we didn't have one that would fit.
I finally got back home around 7 p.m., pooped and covered with dust.
By this time, someone in the gardening group had identified Nanny's trees as "Callery Pears," which I'd never heard of. The root of this tree is often used to graft other fruit trees, like peaches and nectarines and apples. The pits that Nanny planted evidently sprouted the root stock instead of the graft. I did a little more research and learned that the fruit is edible and makes good jelly, but that it needs a good frost to sweeten the fruit.
I'm for sure going to try to make some jelly after we get a good frost.
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