One of those long, rambling, Errol Garner intros today, so you might want to get a cup of tea before we start.

Today’s subject is horticulture (or more specifically, arboriculture), and I toyed with a couple of titles that I then rejected, including: I am Boring, We Arboring (too laboured), and eventually decided on Matters Horticultural. This almost immediately put me in mind of Modern Major General, the party-piece patter-song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. (If you don’t know the song, you can see it performed here…and then you might feel you need to read the lyrics here. Incidentally, the ‘encore’ verses of this particular performance were, in the best G&S tradition, written specifically for this Stratford, Ontario production.)

Those of you who do know the song will not be surprised to learn that, since I thought of the title, I haven’t been able to get the blasted tune out of my head. This then set me thinking about the term – fairly recently coined (in English) – for a tune that you can’t get out of your head: earworm. I was then struck by this word and did a little Google research, the results of which I thought I might share with you. This led me to embellish the title of today’s post so that it now (almost) matches the metrical pattern of the song.

We’ll just wait here a second for the stragglers to catch up. All on the same page? Right!

Earworm, I discover, is a direct borrowing (first spotted in a 1978 novel) from the German for earwig, Ohrwurm, which (in Germany) has been used in this sense for about 70 years. Presumably, the intended metaphor is that some tunes crawl into your ear and nestle there, so that you cannot dislodge them, exactly as earwigs do. That, of course, is where the earwig gets its name from in English – its tendency to invade the human ear

Except, I now discover, that old wives’ tale isn’t where the earwig gets its name from. The Romans called the earwig auricula, from the Latin for earlobe, because they would dry earwigs and grind them to a powder which they then used to treat diseases of the ear. The entire folk myth of earwigs having a habit of invading the human ear evolved as a false explanation of the name.

Incidentally, the wig of earwig comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for insect, beetle, worm, and the English word wiggle almost certainly comes from this root.

OK. That’s enough etymology…and, come to think of it, enough entomology as well. Time to get to the actual topic of this treetise (apologies).

I was never particularly interested in gardening. I grew up in a house with a front garden that was largely paved, except for a number of flower beds that were home to rose-bushes that were my parents’ pride and joy. They produced vast, damask-petalled roses whose scent was sometimes so over-powering that it put you in mind of a six-year-old who had been playing with her mother’s perfume bottle.

In the back garden, a line of giant sunflowers against the garage wall stood like a firing squad that had just been brought to attention. The garden itself was grassed, bordered with flower-beds that sported flowers of which I can remember nothing other than this. My brother and I would play garden tennis, with deckchairs propped on their sides for a net Sometimes a loose ball, or a clumsy foot, would crush a bloom. When that happened, it was best to keep a low profile.

When Bernice and I lived in Wales, I couldn’t really get excited about gardening. There was a very brief period when we started a vegetable garden, but it quickly seemed like a huge amount of work just to feed the local community of slugs, and I soon lost interest.

Over the last 20 years, I have watched our tree grow, until it is now 4 metres tall (and will really need trimming after we have harvested this year), with a span of 2–3 metres. I have also, of course, watched the annual cycle. The tree flowers very early, with the first blossom appearing during winter, making it a herald of the new season of growth in the garden. Soon, the blossom is attracting bees, and the garden is full of activity from the stillness of the early morning and throughout the day.

The first fruit starts to appear around February, and ripens around April. At a certain point (typically a week later than we should) we net the tree, to prevent birds eating the fruit. This year, what with my bad hip, we actually waited until Esther and Maayan came to see us, and then prevailed on them to clamber up ladders and gateposts and fit the net – which they gamely did

With the tree as tall as it is, we have neither the netting nor the crane and platform to cover it all, and so I draw up a contract with the birds that we will leave them all of the fruit growing more than 2 metres above the ground, on condition that they leave the rest for us. I’m not always sure they fully understand the small print, but they actually are fairly well behaved.

Harvesting usually consists of one major sweep, and three or four smaller picks. The size of the harvest varies ridiculously. One year we had about 25 fruits, but this was presumably because the tree was gathering its strength for the following year, when I harvested a total of 20 kilo 12 kilo of it on one day.

So, what do you do with 20 kilo of shesek? Well, obviously, some of it you eat, and, every year, you are shocked by the difference between shesek you buy in the supermarket – small, mildly flavoured, dryish, with a shelf life of a couple of days (and an early season price this year of up to 50(!) shekels a kilo (that’s currently about £11 or over $15 – and the shesek you pick from your tree – big, hearty, bursting with flavour and juice, good for a week. Some of it you give away, although several of our neighbours also have shesek trees, so we don’t give much away.

The bulk of the harvest I freeze to make shesek ice cream. When I started doing this, I was very thorough: skinning the fruit, removing the stalk, then splitting it open to remove the stones and the thin membrane that separates the fruit from the stones. After 10 minutes of this, and viewing the mountain of shesek still to prepare and the tiny bowl that I had so far prepared, I retreated and regrouped.

After a little reflection, I realised that there was no need to peel the fruit. I know it has not been sprayed with any chemicals, my Vitamix blender can reduce the skin to pulp in micro-seconds, and the skin intensifies the flavour of the ice-cream.

I then found, on Google, a blogger whose tree yielded 70kg of fruit; he explained that, if you hold a shesek between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, place the thumb of the other hand on the calyx (the opposite end from the stalk), and push that thumb up through the centre of the fruit, the seeds, the membrane and the calyx will all emerge cleanly from the stalk end of the fruit. I tried this. It worked! Soon, I was cleaning fruit like a fully-paid-up member of the Loquat Gutters Union.

A few of the gutted shesek I set aside for skinning and making jam. Shesek has a very high pectin content, requires no sugar to be added, and its balance of sweet and sour makes a marmaladey-apricotty jam that is excellent.

Now that we have started composting….Let me start that sentence again: Now that Bernice has started composting, the stalks and calyx and membrane and skins can all go back into the ground. Immensely satisfying!

Which only leaves the stones; even they have a role to play, and a major one at that. It transpires that shesek stones are not dissimilar to almonds, or apricot stones, and, in Italy, they are used to make a liqueur that tastes remarkably like amaretto. I collect and wash the stones. When I have a jarful, I spread them out and leave them to dry in the sun for a week, then steep them in grain alcohol, with lemon rind and a vanilla pod. After a month in a warm place out of the sun, with the occasional vigorous shake of the jar, I dilute the alcohol with water (95% alcohol is tempting, but 35% greatly reduces the risk of blindness), and finally mix with a sugar-water syrup, then filter repeatedly until the liquid is clear (or, in my case, until I can’t be bothered to filter any more).

A litre of grain alcohol yields us 3 litres of what I wittily call shisky, although the Italians call it nespolino. Careful reading of multiple sources convinced me that the amount of cyanide leeched from that number of seeds was not harmful, and Bernice has been drinking the shisky for well over a decade now, with no visible effects, other than bumping into the furniture occasionally.

A few years ago, when we ‘upgraded’ our garden, we planted a peach and a nectarine, which each produce enough fruit for us to enjoy, every year, a wonderful week of rediscovering what summer fruits are supposed to taste like. We also planted a lemon, which has not yet realised what its function in life is supposed to be. We are still hoping that, one of these days, the penny will drop, and then we will doubtless drown in lemon curd, lemon drizzle cake and lemon meringue pie. I can imagine worse fates. 

Micha’el and Tslil decided not to wait until Tao’s 50th before gifting him a tree. On his first birthday, he helped them plant an almond tree, and for his second, a Portuguese berry tree. I have no photos of that second planting, so you’ll have to make do with screenshots of Tao WhatsApping with his Auntie Esther.