My mother recently ordered the Autumn Fruits puzzle

[conuly]

Clicky!

The description says: "This puzzle brings a collection of autumn fruits to life. There are figs, grapes, pears, and more. The fruits are amongst leaves and branches in this visually appealing, and tasty, image."

Unless I'm mistaken, the "and more" seems to be Italian plums, pokeberries, and mulberries.

I suppose pokeberries are technically an autumn fruit, though not one I'd recommend people eat*, but mulberries ripen at midsummer. By which I mean "the end of June". I may be wrong about the pokeberries, though I doubt it, but I'm pretty certain that those are definitely mulberries there. They can't be raspberries or blackberries because the leaves are completely wrong for those.

I'm not sure which part of this bothers me more - the fruit you shouldn't eat, or the fruit that's ripe at the wrong time!

* People claim that it's only the seed that's poison and not the fruit itself, and that if you eat the berries judiciously and spit out the seeds you'll be fine, but people say all sorts of things.

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Comments

[fred_mouse]

Looking at the puzzle, agree that those are mulberries, although most of them are unripe. And here they are early summer/ December fruit. But I don't think of figs as autumn either.

[conuly]

I am very firm on my conviction that the solstices mark the *middle* of the season rather than the beginning.

[fred_mouse]

Ish. The European four seasons don't fit well here -- the Nyoongar calendar has six seasons of about two months each. Of those, two fit as 'summer', and thus run December through March, sometimes in to early April (it is often 'summer' until easter). And we get 2 - 3 crops of figs in a season, depending on how good the season is. But I'm pretty sure that for us, all of those crops except the sometimes third are summer.

[conuly]

That's all you're gonna tell me about the Nyoongar calendar!?

[fred_mouse]

:)

http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/nyoongar.shtml is a good link. It is part of a collaboration between First Nations people and the Bureau of Meteorology, and there are lots of details I wouldn't have remembered in a quick summary.

[mtbc]

I at least agree that they're too late for the beginning!

[conuly]

As for figs, around here they do ripen around the start of Septemberish, which I'd call early fall.

[wpadmirer]

When I was working in a pediatrics practice we had a child who had eaten pokeberries, and her mother brought her in and was totally panicked. She had to be given an emetic. They ARE poisonous.

[conuly]

Well, the seeds certainly are. Any child is going to eat the seeds. Advocates of eating them - god, why? - swear that the worst they ever felt when spitting out the seeds is a tingly sensation on the lips, and god why do they do this to themselves. Honestly, it's better to just avoid the damn thing altogether.

[redbird]

I agree, those are definitely mulberries, and either a mix of varieties, or a lot of them are unripe.

Certainly in New York City, mulberries are an early summer fruit, even using the meteorological seasons, in which summer is June 1-August 31. That sort of works for where we live, but there's a lot of the planet where four even-length seasons aren't even close to accurate.

This post got me poking around a little, and I see that in warmer climates figs may produce two crops a year. Fig trees aren't really hardy in New York's zone 7, though there are tricks for overwintering them, and some recently developed cultivars might survive a New York winter without that help (being hardy down to about -10°C, or 14°F).

[hudebnik]

I met a large, fruit-bearing fig tree in the back yard of a large house in Queens, NYC. It was forty years ago, though, so I have no idea where in Queens, much less whether the tree is still there.

(My father was at a church meeting in the house, which was owned by his church, and I wasn't interested so I spent the day in the back yard. I had recently picked up a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, so I spent about an hour drawing an acorn-cap in scale-by-scale detail.)

[conuly]

I can beat that - one of our local Sri Lankan restaurants, the owner swears she has a mango tree in her backyard! I've seen plenty of figs in the city, but mango!?

[hudebnik]

Perhaps if you had a back yard that was completely surrounded by houses, so it was sheltered from the wind and a few degrees warmer than if it weren't so surrounded...

[conuly]

Bensonhurst figs appear to survive anything, which is why they're called Bensonhurst figs, and they don't need terribly special treatment to overwinter. Source: Half the houses around me have 'em, and we had two in our yard as kids, plus a mulberry tree.

[redbird]

Figs are clearly hardier than some of the how-to-grow-things sites make it sound. Thanks.

[conuly]

Well, that variety is renowned for hardiness. You can thank Italian immigrants for it. Though it's also possible that climate change is making it easier....

[loligo]

Agreed on the mulberries, but I'm not seeing any pokeberries. I think the open clusters of dark berries with red stems are elderberries. Poke clusters are columnar, at least the ones that keep popping up in my yard are.

[hudebnik]

I agree, those look a lot like elderberries to me.

[melannen]

+1 Pretty sure those are elderberries. Which are a least edible, more-or-less. And unripe mulberries, though it's just possible there's a few underripe wineberries/dewberries too.

Which are also all summer fruit around here? Honestly I would have called this whole puzzle something more like "summer hedgerow fruit". It's a lovely image though!

[conuly]

Ah, I see it now that I googled! They do look fairly similar!

[movingfinger]

I see blackberries, currants, elderberries, figs, grapes, pears or seckel pears, prune plums (time for the plum cake!), and those look like raspberries (red and golden). Not all of the fruit shown is ripe, though. All of these are ripe or nearly so around my area this minute!

[conuly]

They're definitely not raspberries - the leaves are totally different.