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The story of the magic tree

This morning I ate a bowl of Cheerios with delicious sliced peaches on top. We are enjoying some of the best peaches I’ve ever tasted, and we didn’t buy them or grow them.

Well, you may ask, where did they come from?

These peaches came from the magic tree.

Our Merritt corn has been coming in this week, and it’s been a very busy time. We’ve put corn in the freezer and sold a lot. So there have been many trips back and forth to the garden. Two days ago I was standing by the chicken pen and noticed a tree near the pen full of small peaches. They were ripe. So we picked one, and I tasted it expecting it to be bitter. But it wasn’t. It was absolutely delicious.

olivia6-25 Page 4A.inddWe go that way often and have never noticed this tree. After all, there are a lot of trees out there.

But somehow with no help from human hands, a peach tree has appeared out of nowhere and is full of wonderful peaches.

We grow blueberries, figs, grapes and blackberries and have one old pear tree. But we’ve never been successful in trying to grow peaches. So we always buy them during the summer. It’s nothing short of a miracle to discover the existence of this tree.

There’s a covered metal bucket in the kitchen we put vegetable and fruit scraps into. When it’s full, it’s taken out to the chicken pen and thrown out for them to enjoy.

The only explanation for the appearance of this tree we can come up with is that at some point in time years ago when a bucket of peach peelings and pits were thrown into the chicken pen, one of the pits must have gone through the wire and somehow planted itself.

Then, with no care, no fertilizer, no insect spray and through drought and flood, this tree not only survived, it thrived.

When I think of the hard work involved in growing produce — the plowing, planting, weeding, cultivating, thinning, spraying and picking — it is amazing to know this little peach tree made it on its own.

Now that we know it’s here, we will care for it. Next year we’ll see what happens after a year of loving care.

As it has thrived on neglect, it will be interesting to see if care makes it better or kills it.

Humans always think they are in control of things. Grandmama was a collector of quotable quotes. One of her favorites was, “Man proposes, but God disposes.”