and meanwhile, down on the farmlet...

Every day we're inching closer to summer.  And every day I check the apricots on the tree to test for done-ness.

The trick with the apricots is that they'll be ready all at once, all several hundred of them, so it's good to be ready.  It's good to have a sense of the tarts, the jam, the grilled variations that are possible.  It's good to have paper bags stockpiled for the apricot-visitors. 

Hundreds of apricots are, I think you'll agree, a good problem to have.

If you can even qualify them as "problem."

We didn't think we'd have any apricots at all this year.  In a kitchen cabinet, I still have bags of dehydrated apricots from last year, dried in a rush and then hidden, in anticipation of that bumper crop not being repeated.

Lo and behold, again the tree is loaded down with fruit, branches curling toward the ground, within arm's reach of a supine position on the hammock. Perfection.

This year's crop is an excellent reminder, really, about abundance -- a tasty cautionary tale about not approaching things, food, as inherently scarce.

Guess what? There will always be more.

This year, there will be LOTS more.  I spent a quarter of an hour this morning picking partly eaten fruits out of the lawn under the tree, dropped there by wasteful squirrels who eat half and then drop their bounty. And still there are more apricots than they could possibly divide between themselves and the birds, still more than plenty for us and them. 

And none of it is wasted. Not when any dropped or moldy fruits get tipped back into the compost, mixed with grass clipping and leaves and poppies, turned back into the nourishment that will feed this year's peppers and roses, next year's stone fruits.

Always More and Nothing Wasted.

Gardening on no matter what scale, whether you just have a little patch of dirt, a farmlet like ours, or a giant paradise, just keeps teaching this lesson: always more and nothing wasted, a constant cycling of matter and seasons, that winds up as a sweet soft apricot resting in the palm of your hand, that delicious moment before the first bite, and everything that follows.

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