A184: Apricots and other Stone Fruit

In my weekly Farmer’s Market buying, blogging framework I try to pick something new. This week of *A* - the redux – I didn’t spot some new thing to try. I had hoped I would be seeing towering amaranth plants in our community garden. Not. I have not had any success with any of the amaranth seeds I planted in May.

What I did see that made me really happy were piles and piles of stone fruit. Besides the ubiquitous lemon, a citrus I would like to grow myself because I use lemon more than any other fruit in my cooking, stone fruits are my definition of the best fruits of summer.

For the last two weeks, I have added tiny apricots not only to my oatmeal, but to other things. I have added them to a dish of heated kale, potatoes and onions and to a salad. This little taste of sweet with the soft texture gave these last two dishes a really distinctive difference.

As a kid in the late 50’s and early 60’s I remember our getting a ‘lug’ of peaches each summer. A lug was a wooden crate of individually wrapped peaches. Each peach was wrapped in tissue. What a treasure.

But, more than my current recipes or my childhood memories I want to share my newfound excitement for a totally new use for peach pits. Flooring! This is a concept I discovered recently and I find it intriguing. This flooring has a history in South Africa. It is now being manufactured at Stone Fruit Floors.

The floor consists of peach pips that are packed by hand onto a glued surface and filled with a silica sand and resin mixture, then sealed with a twin pack urethane. The sharp edges of the pips are grinded off, firstly to expose the nice red colour hue of the pips and secondly to make it very comfortable to walk on them with bare feet.

The first reaction is that this must be a really green alternative. But, as you can see the silica sand / resin mixture, the ocean of urethane negates the natural peach pit part. Right? Well, I am not ready to dismiss this out of turn. Just for the use a peach pits alone I want to keep this in my mind.

Stones. Stones are a basic of our building tradition. For me, nothing says trite or boring like a granite countertop. I want to scream when I see a televised design reveal showing a granite counter and every other human yelling, “Awesome!” I want to hurl at the robotic utterances, vapid designs and monstrous waste of natural resources. Stones are being blasted, gouged from the earth.

Leave the damn stones in the earth. Quit digging pits and start collecting pits from peaches, olives, cherries and apricots. Capture a vast diversity of plant stones now being tossed into landfills.

Figure out how to make the resin finishes from recycled plastic waste. And, as usual, I love to take the commercial product and try to figure out how to hack it. How can we in the do it yourself category carry this off?

Update: The pits, this is the accurate description for our Senate. It is well and truly in the pits as these miserable people caved in and voted away our forth amendment rights via the FISA legislation. Bush power to spy on us with the assistance of the telecoms is now official - with absolute immunity from prosecution. Obama could have shown himself a leader. He didn't and I am not surprised.