Wild Hope Homestead

It seems you can either have not enough feijoas or too many. We have a case of too many. There are three feijoa trees along the front of the property, of great size and stamina. When the feijoas began to fall I scurried around, jealously collecting them so the passers-by, especially greedy kids, wouldn’t take them all. Those pesky kids! When did I become old? Once we had reached three feijoa collection areas in the kitchen I realised we had a lot. I stopped scurrying. We eat them every day, we have given some away, and still they keep coming.

While I was planting my strawberries the other day, a delightful young man who has an intellectual disability can running over to my fence that borders the park and asked what I was doing. He then began to talk about my feijoas, which, bordering the footpath, are a well-known neighbourhood fact. He repeatedly told me that I could sell them for $5 a bag. Unfortunately, I’m not eight years old anymore. I pictured an almost-30-year-old trying to sell bags of feijoas in a neighbourhood where people can get them for free from my trees and the adjacent footpath. I looked lonely and penniless plus a little bit daft. Maybe I could target a different neighbourhood, sell them out of the boot of my car. But I’m still not eight years old. Maybe I could borrow someone’s kid for some pity factor. We once had a door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales lady do that. She had two kids in tow and it was her first sales run, so I felt sorry for her and let her do the demo, even though I didn’t want the vacuum cleaner. We found out halfway through that they weren’t even her kids when she called one of them the wrong name. Oops! I don’t think I”ll borrow a kid. I’d have to pay them anyway.

No, there’s only one thing for it – make stuff with feijoas in it. The feijoa recipe hunt has now begun. The Husband, being so very handy in the kitchen, has already made feijoa sorbet. Next on my list are feijoa muffins, which I have made before, a Feijoa Crumble and a Feijoa Chutney by Annabel Langbein. Then maybe some more feijoa sorbet if we still have a feijoa glut. If all else fails I suppose I could always become a feijoa salesperson.