Grandma's grapefruit garden

My grandmother has been growing grapefruit for many years, since I was just learning to walk, and now it has been more than ten years. At first, she only wanted a large garden to grow vegetables, so my grandfather and father indulged her and bought her a large garden in the village. She did not grow vegetables but decided to grow Dien grapefruit. She personally selected each tree of Dien grapefruit and took care of it carefully until the fruiting season. Like that, her grapefruit garden has more and more fruit every year. I like to see her grapefruit garden the most around Tet, which is the grapefruit harvest season.

The grapefruit trees in her garden are not too tall but have wide canopies, branches hanging down, many fruits almost touching the ground so picking ripe grapefruit is not difficult. The whole garden of dozens of grapefruit trees with thousands of golden fruits peeking out from behind the green canopy seemed to beckon me.

Near Tet, my grandmother started harvesting the grapefruit garden, so in my free time, I went to the garden to help her cut the grapefruit. The beautiful, round, shiny, fragrant fruits were marked by her to be picked and sold to buyers to display on the five-fruit tray. As for the other fruits, she told me to pick them gradually, put them in baskets for my father to transport home and sell to customers. She did not want to sell the whole garden to traders because she liked to pick the grapefruit herself, cherish and enjoy the results of a year of care and cultivation.

Every early spring, when the grapefruit trees bloom, my grandmother is very careful. She has learned the techniques of caring for grapefruit trees so well that she limits watering and does not fertilize to avoid losing flowers. She diligently prunes the branches in the trunk early, the branches that do not flower. When the tree has too many flowers, she prunes the flower clusters in the trunk, the flower clusters without leaves, to focus on nurturing the remaining flowers.

After about 2-3 weeks of setting, the grapefruits are at the physiological stage of fruit drop, and poorly cared for trees can drop fruit en masse. Therefore, my grandmother proceeded to prune the fruit on the wrong bunch, prune the small fruit, the crooked fruit, the fruit in the bunch that is too thick, the fruit in the unfavorable position, the unbalanced fruit... to create conditions for the main fruit to develop well. She also used a specialized pruning tool to cut off the branches that flowered but were not capable of setting fruit or the small, dry branches.

After months of hard work, when she saw the grapefruit garden full of green, round fruits as big as small bowls, she breathed a sigh of relief. But last year, Typhoon No. 3 Yagi swept through and caused her grapefruit garden to drop a lot of fruit. At that time, the grapefruit was edible but still had a bitter taste on the tip of the tongue and in the palate, so she felt very sorry.

She looked at the pile of green grapefruits that had fallen from the storm and gathered in a corner of the garden, feeling sad and absent-minded. Then she thought of a way to make use of the fallen grapefruits. She used the peels to boil water to wash her hair and made her own grapefruit essential oil to prevent hair loss. When the grapefruit segments were still young, she soaked them in rock sugar and honey to create a refreshing, pleasant taste.

In the early years, the grapefruit in her garden was not as delicious as the real Dien grapefruit. My father said that Dien grapefruit had to be grown in Dien land to be delicious. If we brought it home to grow, the soil and climate conditions would be different, so the grapefruit would not be as sweet. But in the following years, my grandmother took good care of it, so the grapefruit was so delicious that everyone thought it was real Dien grapefruit.

Speaking of the grapefruit of “Mrs. Tam” garden - my grandmother’s name, many people around here know the irreplaceable deliciousness of this grapefruit. Many people order from her very early, several months before Tet to have the most beautiful grapefruit to display on the five-fruit tray, offering to their ancestors on the occasion of the new spring.

The Dien grapefruit in my grandmother's garden has a strong Dien aroma and sweet taste. Picking up the grapefruit, the aroma still lingers in your hand. The rich sweetness and aroma are unmistakable, after eating, the sweet aroma still lingers and does not fade away like some other grapefruits.

Time flies so fast, in a flash it has become spring. Tet has also passed. Every time I look at my grandmother’s golden, hanging grapefruit garden, I know that spring has come to my garden, to the end of the alley. I am about to become a young woman, soon I will be far from my grandmother, far from my family, far from my beloved grapefruit garden to go to school. I long to return to my childhood to go pick grapefruit with my grandmother, to feel the scent of spring spreading somewhere…