365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Sunday, October 1, 2017
Doing The Splits
Day 353: The first of the Akebia pods has done the splits, revealing a fat cylindrical object which to my mind resembles some kind of sea slug. This is the edible portion of the fruit. Now I am going to ask you to use your imagination. Set the following pictures in your mind:
Imagine watermelon seeds which instead of being flat are egg-shaped, i.e., picture seeds which are roughly the size of watermelon seeds, but they're shaped like teardrops and they're hard. If you're familiar with pomegranate seeds, the seeds in your imagination would be similar, but pomegranate seeds are a little pointier on the small end.
Now mentally put yourself in the kitchen. You're cooking something which requires the addition of either confectioner's sugar or powdered stevia. As you pull open the plastic inner wrapper, you drop the box. A ~poof!~ of sweet dust flies into the air just as you're taking a breath. Some of the dust...not much, just a little...goes up your nostrils. It's not quite enough to make you sneeze, but close.
Ready? Do you have those two images clearly in your minds? Okay, if you were to wrap those teardrop-shaped seeds in a very thin coating of your sweetened, viscid nasal mucus and then were to stick a gob of them in your mouth, you'd get the idea of what the pulp of the Akebia fruit feels and tastes like.
Although the Akebia cross-pollination experiment has come to a successful conclusion, I do not think we'll go down this road again.
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