By Steve Osuji
I planted coconut trees; I planted local pears (ube); l planted mango trees, orange trees, guava, lime, tangerine, moringa, bitter kola, kolanut and now this AVOCADO PEAR!
Of all these, only bitter kola and kolanut have I not harvested. All the others I have enjoyed enormously in the cause of the last two decades.
Why are you planting these trees that would take decades to fruit? I have been asked.
And I would answer: the fruits you relish today, who planted them?
Six years on, I didn’t think my AVOCADO was ready to fruit yet. I didn’t even notice the littering of flower buds…
Then late last December, it handed me a Christmas gift – bulbous green pears, edible chlorophyll dangling so low I would stoop to pluck them… what joyous yuletide.
I had bought a set of particularly large and egg-yoke like pears in 2014 or thereabouts, and I couldn’t help but make a nursery of the seeds.
Today, this tree appears to me like a queen; slender-waist queen: lithe, regal with plunging chest.
And the fruits? They call this specie butter pear! But I say this must be the queen mother of all avocado pears: a long proud neck seated on a rhomboid bottom like a sculpted goose.
How does it taste? It must be the very taste of life: milk and butter and honey… only one thing probably tastes better! Take a guess …
I planted for posterity but here I am taking the first picks.
-Steve Osuji is a journalist, public affairs analyst and a lover of gardening.