I don't think I'm exposing any secrets by telling you that my darling husband loves quince jelly, preferably on a slice of buttered, freshly baked sour dough or a freshly cooked crumpet. I'm surprised he hasn't had it on his other love, ice-cream. So, he was super excited when Mum and Dad gave him a quince tree one birthday. Said tree was duly planted with so much love and tenderness it couldn't do anything but succeed. And so it did, producing one or two quinces in it's very first year increasing to half a dozen in its fourth. Not quite enough for quince jelly sadly but definitely enough to slow roast to have with ice-cream. In it's fifth or sixth year though, the tree set at least two dozen quinces. Which should have resulted in singing and dancing on darling husbands' part. If only that year wasn't the year we moved down to our patch of paradise, just a few months ahead of the fruit ripening. Oh dear.
Needless to say, once we'd moved in and unpacked what seemed like a gazillion boxes, we began a mission to find a quince tree. Do you think we could find one? Not on your Nelly. We searched every nursery within coo-ee of where we live, and a few beyond, without any luck. R was on the point of giving up when, luck would have it, we decided to take Mum to visit a tree nursery near to where she lived. Low and behold, hidden in the back row behind all of the other trees, looking very sad and neglected was a quince. A very advanced, neglected sad specimen but a quince all the same. Mum and I stood watch - just in case there was someone else on the hunt for the elusive quince - while R went and found the owner to make the deal. The owner was more than happy to sell the tree, which he didn't even know he had and gladly took the dosh from R's outstretched hand.
With sold label duly applied, we chuffed off to get our ute. The tree was never going to fit in the daily drive!! We didn't expect we'd need a hand saw and a lot of hard graft to pick up the quince though. The poor thing had been in situ so long it had taken root in the nursery. Between three of us we finally managed to get it, and it's three dozen quinces, loaded into the back of the ute. By the time we got home the poor thing was looking very wind burnt and sorry. It was more luck than planning that made us leave it in the pot to recover for a month or so.
Then came the next challenge, planting. It was a huge effort to get the tree out of the pot. When we did, we found the tap root was almost as thick as my wrist and it was curled in a lovely spiral, slinky style, around the pot. We um'd and ah'd about what to do and finally decided to prune the tap root at the point where it started to curl. We took off probably three quarters of the root before we finally put it into the ground. We then gave it a goodly amount of Seasol and food and crossed our fingers. It's fair to say, we weren't too hopeful that it would survive such a brutal transplanting. But survive it did. And this year, it produced fruit. Yaaaaay.
Here is our first ever quince. The first of many, many more to come we hope. R has lined up the empty jars in anticipation of them being filled with some lovely, deep pink jelly!!
No comments:
Post a Comment