Going Nuts

We already mentioned that we’re excited to have a number of fruit trees in our yard, planted a few years ago by the owner. Unfortunately none of them have yielded any fruit ripe enough to eat even though we water them every few days. Maybe this is because the adolescents that come and go (it’s unclear if they’re related to our guard’s family) seem to pick off whatever they see on the trees no matter how small/unripe it is. We’re still working on how to manage that in the right way. 

Recently we almost went nuts about the two very tall palm trees in the back of the house that were almost built into the property wall. One is a date palm and the other is some kind of nut we’ve never seen before (Deleb palm = giginya). This second tree has a lot of green nuts hanging on it, although we were told they need to turn orange/reddish to show they’re ripe. A few times we’d seen boys attempting to climb the tree, but it’s very tall. This time they got out a rough wooden ladder and then pulled themselves up the lowest leaves , and proceeded to lop off most of the bunches of nuts with a machete. 


You chop the nut into thirds and there is a small ball of pear-like material in the middle of each third, which is supposed to be sugary sweet. We were a little miffed to be offered only a couple nuts off of what we were told was now “our tree” before the rest of them disappeared, but more upset that the inner “fruit” wasn’t even tasty because it wasn’t close to being ripe. It was easy enough to let this one go because I figure I wasn’t going to do any crazy acrobatics to get the strange nuts off the tree anyway. But once again with our fruit we come up against the tension between having and sharing, wasting and saving, and a communal vs. individual mentality.