My wife wants to make room around our overgrown house for some tropical fruit trees. Which is a highly laudable but somewhat overwhelming proposition to me. We currently have excessive numbers of coconuts and a few of these underrated beauties:
Seagrapes are hardy buggers, just right for people like me endowed with black thumbs. I have one bush that started to topple when inundated by Wilma's floods in 2005 but I didn't touch the tree except to cover up the exposed roots and the thing is flourishing like never before. My kind of plant. While the grapes are edible and i love eating them, I should note there are a few issues with seagrapes. One is that their giant green leaves turn into crisp brown dead dinner plates when they fall off the tree which they do copiously year round:
When the winds blow, as they often do, these large dead leaves blow all over the place rattling and crackling as they go. They create carpets of dead leaves. Also, like most fruit the seagrapes tend to riped all at once. This is good for the birds, mourning doves mostly, that live in my neighborhood, but the ripe grapes tend to fall off in clusters when the stems are shaken and they make a peculiar mess:
I do like having this huge clump covering half my driveway, I look out of my study window and there it sits, huge and green and full of fruit:
Here's the hard part- how to describe the flavor of these so called grapes? Well, they are fresh and taste like a mild grape, a little astringent, not too sweet and are little more than a large black pip surrounded by a thin covering of flesh. I peeled a couple to illustrate my feeble powers of description:
I like grapes and I like them wild too. When I was growing up in Italy one of the pleasures of my unfettered summers was the ability to head out into the fields in late August and take up residence among the leaves of the vineyards for a little light snacking. The beauty of the vines growing in central Italy is that they are planted in long lines and grow about six feet tall, so that in the fullness of summer their leaves cascade to the ground and a small boy can sit under them, invisible, and gorge on ripe grapes.
We look angelic, after a fashion but we were seven year old expert fruit thieves, Diego in the background, and I. My mother was always puzzled why I came home from a morning of wandering around the fields and wasn't famished. So it is that to this day I get a strange nostalgic pleasure from stealing my own seagrapes from the bush in my own yard:
It was a Huckleberry Finn existence though I hadn't read Mark Twain at that stage in my life. Aside from stealing grapes from the sharecroppers around the village I and my buddies wandered the hills and fields and bothered the grown ups like this guy with a herd of pigs, or a flock of pigs, or a porker of pigs:
I don't remember this picture being taken by my older sister claims the honor. I do remember the grapes, the symbol of summer at its peak. Nowadays that means hurricane season at its peak but I take my nostalgia from my seagrape bush:
Just a taste of what is essentially a wild grape and one gets transported across time and space. Powerful fruit, indeed.
Seagrapes are hardy buggers, just right for people like me endowed with black thumbs. I have one bush that started to topple when inundated by Wilma's floods in 2005 but I didn't touch the tree except to cover up the exposed roots and the thing is flourishing like never before. My kind of plant. While the grapes are edible and i love eating them, I should note there are a few issues with seagrapes. One is that their giant green leaves turn into crisp brown dead dinner plates when they fall off the tree which they do copiously year round:When the winds blow, as they often do, these large dead leaves blow all over the place rattling and crackling as they go. They create carpets of dead leaves. Also, like most fruit the seagrapes tend to riped all at once. This is good for the birds, mourning doves mostly, that live in my neighborhood, but the ripe grapes tend to fall off in clusters when the stems are shaken and they make a peculiar mess:I do like having this huge clump covering half my driveway, I look out of my study window and there it sits, huge and green and full of fruit:Here's the hard part- how to describe the flavor of these so called grapes? Well, they are fresh and taste like a mild grape, a little astringent, not too sweet and are little more than a large black pip surrounded by a thin covering of flesh. I peeled a couple to illustrate my feeble powers of description: I like grapes and I like them wild too. When I was growing up in Italy one of the pleasures of my unfettered summers was the ability to head out into the fields in late August and take up residence among the leaves of the vineyards for a little light snacking. The beauty of the vines growing in central Italy is that they are planted in long lines and grow about six feet tall, so that in the fullness of summer their leaves cascade to the ground and a small boy can sit under them, invisible, and gorge on ripe grapes.We look angelic, after a fashion but we were seven year old expert fruit thieves, Diego in the background, and I. My mother was always puzzled why I came home from a morning of wandering around the fields and wasn't famished. So it is that to this day I get a strange nostalgic pleasure from stealing my own seagrapes from the bush in my own yard:It was a Huckleberry Finn existence though I hadn't read Mark Twain at that stage in my life. Aside from stealing grapes from the sharecroppers around the village I and my buddies wandered the hills and fields and bothered the grown ups like this guy with a herd of pigs, or a flock of pigs, or a porker of pigs:I don't remember this picture being taken by my older sister claims the honor. I do remember the grapes, the symbol of summer at its peak. Nowadays that means hurricane season at its peak but I take my nostalgia from my seagrape bush:Just a taste of what is essentially a wild grape and one gets transported across time and space. Powerful fruit, indeed.