My landlord, Stanko Matic, planted the apricot tree that shades my backyard. Stanko, a gentle giant in his seventh decade, immigrated with his wife to Canada from Yugoslavia many years ago.
Every summer he fills my yard with tomato plants grown from heritage seeds from the old country. Peppers, cucumbers, garlic and leeks accompany the tomatoes in his strictly organic garden. He urges me to harvest my fill.
He planted the apricot tree 10 years ago: “before that… was cherry tree, but the birds eat. Before cherry was apple tree, small green apple, kind that nobody eat.”
Looking out over his piece of the urban forest, he says our apricot tree won’t be around much longer. We’ll get maybe three or four more years from it. It does look a bit ragged. Last summer a windstorm snapped off a large limb and hurled it into my neighbour’s yard. Hardened gobs of amber resin now ooze where the bark has split. In the three years I’ve lived here we’ve had just one true apricot harvest. The squirrels beat us to most of the fruit before it was even ripe.
Despite its imperfections, this gnarled, sap-clotted tree brings me such happiness. Its blossoms burst open in the spring earlier than those of any of Ontario’s other fruit trees. We’ve eaten countless summer meals at the picnic table in my backyard, shaded by its boughs. And the apricot pie my daughter made during the year of the great harvest is the stuff of gastronomic legend.
Soaring food costs have inspired most of us to rethink our food-gathering strategies. Besides the decadent pleasure of eating fruit plucked fresh from the branch, a tree like this can bolster a family’s pantry year round, with homemade jellies and syrups to last through winter.
For those struggling with the challenge of picking their fruit tree’s bounty, the Toronto organization Not Far From the Tree offers a residential fruit picking program that dispatches volunteer teams to aid in the harvest.
To know exactly where your fruit comes from and how it was grown, to taste its nectar explode in your mouth as your teeth pierce skin still warm from the sun – these are privileges, precious and rare.
And though when planting in your own yard, it is always best to consider native species – it is nonetheless important to nurture and care for all of urban forest. After all it is the diversity that contributes to the richness of Toronto’s urban spaces.
A fruit tree is a long-term commitment, but one so utterly worthwhile, even in an urban forest.
