Picking Guyabano

In the province, most people would go out of their houses by the afternoon when the sun’s about to set, this is because it is not too hot anymore.

The same with my husband and I. We just stay indoors from after lunch until around 4:30 or 5 PM. As long as there’s no sprinkles of rain outside, we can go out and get the baby to see the outside world.

One fine afternoon after the husband was done with his daily meetings, we let our baby Matti do some walking exercises, and as you can see, he is unstoppable. He wanted to explore and go to other areas we don’t want him to go especially that road, we live just next to the road and there are so many vehicles passing by especially at this hour of the day when workers are on the way back to their homes.

So we have to hold the baby and be very vigilant with the surrounding. Until we noticed a guyabano fruit is ready for harvest! We have a backyard garden and there’s a guyabano or soursop tree. It’s been awhile since we had harvested one because most of the time, the birds get to them first so we have to be quick and harvest it before any other living creature does.

But before we reached the tree, I was caught by the string beans that my father had grown and now they are bearing fruit already!

We will surely cook some of these soon, I love stir fried string beans with soy sauce. I could munch on that for lunch.

Then there’s also a lemon tree in our backyard, this has been growing for a few years already and has been bearing fruit too nonstop. The only thing is that the fruit isn’t as juicy as we thought it would be, perhaps it’s the soil. The fruit grows bigger than how usual lemons in the supermarket look but it has thick peels and it is hard to extract the juice from it.

My father still uses them as he likes diffusing it in water and sometimes we use it for adobo too but it just takes effort.

Anyway, my husband got the bamboo pole he will use to pick the fruit as it is a little farther. It only took a few push and the fruit clipped into the bamboo’s chipped end.

Matti got a little surprised when his father got a hand of the fruit. Probably he was more concerned that there were black ants hovering the fruit.

Guyabano has been known to be a cancer-fighting food, it is also packed with Vitamin C, it can help in a variety of stomach ailments as well and it helps reduce pain in joints and muscles. This is also a great food for pregnant women.

While at the backyard garden, we noticed some tomatoes and peppers ready to be harvested. So we took them as well and here, my husband showing off the tomatoes, they are the last batch because the others were already harvested a few days ago.

We noticed that these tomatoes have some imperfections in them and we have no idea why they are like that, some were even having cuts in their skins but these are still good for soups and even for ceviche.

My husband was all tired carrying the baby so he rested a bit on the pile tree barks which were placed there as we are making a new fence for the garden.

The afternoon was also long and it was getting dark, insects and mosquitos are already coming out and will feast on us if we don’t get back inside the house.