![]() ![]() The Peninsula Garden Club meets Monday at 7 p.m. Les finds them at their best “fresh off the tree.” Sallie and Les, her husband, use most of their Liberty apples for juicing, but the fruit is also good for cooking. The flesh was crisp and white, very juicy with a rich flavour. Sallie invited me to pick and taste an apple. On the tour through her large, productive garden, we came across a broad, very healthy-looking tree loaded with dark red apples with some golden undertones. Sallie, a former close neighbour and friend who still lives not far away, asked me to visit a few weeks ago to answer some garden questions and offer some ideas for possible changes to the landscape. The apples are usually ready to pick in late September. The flavour is reputed to become even more intense after a short time in storage.Įlstar is a Cox’s Orange Pippin-type apple that is easier to grow than Cox, but it has a similar superb, sweet-tart flavour. That last taste of Elstar reminded me what a wonderfully delicious apple it is. The apples are a beautiful red, at the ripe stage, over yellow. I recalled commenting on the tree as it began producing fruit two years ago. She’d lost the label and wanted to identify the tree for her home’s new owner. The last time we spoke over the fence, when Gisela told me she was moving away, she asked me to take a bite from an apple just picked from one of her trees nearby. This simple hand tool with a slender hooked steel blade end is used to remove moss, weeds and grass from between closely spaced pavers and in the cracks of patios. We’d been talking about the popularity of this tool, and not just among gardeners. It was a crevice tool, or “crack weeder” from Lee Valley Tools. One day, Gisela phoned and asked me to meet her at the fence. She just mixes together grated potato with minced onion, egg(s) and a little flour, and adds salt as the cakes fry in butter or oil. Like many of us when making familiar dishes, Gisela doesn’t have precise amounts for the ingredients in potato pancakes. One Sunday morning, she called me to the fence to pick up a plate holding a potato cake, a specialty she made every week for her mother. She grew wonderful potatoes and pole beans - her favourite garden produce. There was much gleeful exchange of recipes too.Īt her new condo, Gisela will miss her garden. It is just 120 cm high, with a broad top we used for leaving garden produce and baked treats for each other. A few years ago, she built an attractive replacement fence between our back gardens. The third missing neighour, Gisela, moved into her home at the same time as I moved into mine. Though it’s not a truck, with the back seats down, its nether regions give me plenty of space for hauling garden supplies. We found one that passed inspection at my garage. When my good old 1987 pickup truck finally rusted out, Mel, who lived next door with his wife, Irene, volunteered to look with me for a decent used utility vehicle. I’ll miss them and remember their kindnesses. In the past month, I lost three neighbours. ![]()
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