Pomegranate

Pomegranate 1

Haiku 229

Oh Pomegranate

Used to eat you with a pin!

Full of seeds art thou

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Pomegranate 2

Hooray! I found a flower on my newly planted pomegranate tree. This was completely unexpected, as the tree is tiny.

Pomegranate 3

Now when I was a kid my Mum sometimes bought one of these exotic fruits and cut it open for my brother and me to eat. I remember very clearly, she gave us a sewing pin each and that was how we were told to eat it.

Pomegranate 4

As the flower began turning into a ‘fruit’, I regularly checked on it to monitor its progress. I couldn’t wait for it to grow into a large round fruit.

Pomegranate 5

Then sadly one morning I found it on the ground!

Something had chewed it off! You can see how tiny it was here in my fingers.

Pomegranate 6

So no fruit this year!

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Side Story – Pomegranates in Kuruman

When the girls were young, we stayed for a year in the middle of the country, in the middle of nowhere. We were 100 kilometres from Kuruman.

We’d drive there many weekends, mostly for something to do, but it was a wonderful place. Kuruman has the best pizzas we have ever eaten. I remember it being very hot. About an hour north of Kuruman is a place called Hotazel; so you understand!

In Kuruman there is a natural spring of fresh water welling up out of the ground, called “Die Oog” – “The Eye”. It was always a lovely cool shady place to visit for respite from the sun.

There was also the Moffat Mission; where Mary Moffat had lived. She married David Livingstone.

We visited the Moffat Mission and the first thing that struck me were the enormous Pomegranate Trees, growing in a long avenue. I’d seldom even seen a pomegranate before then, and those were always bought from a shop.

Here were so many trees, all laden down with fruit. The ground underneath them was covered with fallen over-ripe fruit and you squished it as you walked.

Apart from the awesome pomegranate trees, I can highly recommend a visit to the Moffat Mission – if you ever happen to find yourself in the middle of nowhere. If nothing else, it will be a totally unique experience; you can walk where Livingstone walked!