January is harvest time for most edibles growing on our property, mangos being the exception that comes mid-year. Near the top center of the image above there is a cluster of bananas. Roughly a hundred on that bunch. Bananas come in many varieties, I learned while living in India. To my surprise, just in recent months I learned that while banana is a fruit, it is botanically in the berry family. Large herbaceous flowering plants that have served as shade for coffee on this property for most of the last century, just a few feet to the right of those few banana trees are a few coffee trees.

Right now the cherries on those trees are deep red, ready to pick. One year ago, and one year before that, I harvested these cherries not to produce beverage but to produce seedlings. Taking down that bunch of bananas will be about half an hour of work, whereas picking all these coffee cherries seen above will be several hours of work.

A mandarin orange tree across the property currently has at least 100 ripe fruits on it today. A few hours of harvest time. Even a smaller tree like the one below has 30 or so oranges of  a different variety on it. An hour of harvest time.

Another 50 here. 90 minutes.

Another 30 here.

And finally this cluster of three trees where I will start harvesting with the long handled basket-catcher. That will take my morning today, happily.