I live in the usa, upper Midwest. It's the shittiest part of winter here, below zero one day, muddy, damp and bleak the next.

I'm looking at seeds to order next year's garden.

I've never had a star fruit that tasted like anything but mildly sour. Papayas we get are flavorless and slimy.

I've never had passion fruit or pitaya.

But in the summer we have lovely fruit. The first thing in the spring we use like a fruit is actually a vegetable. Rhubarb has a thick stalk, is very sour, and we stew it with sugar. The leaves are poisonous. It grows all summer long, and we eat it stewed like jam or baked into quick bread or pies. It pairs nicely with strawberry, which come ripe in June.

Last summer our mulberries went crazy. Mulberry trees are filled with the tiny berries in May, on a good year. I filled gallon bags with them and have been putting them in smoothies every morning. I made mulberry syrup and mulberry jam. We have three types of mulberries that grow wild in our area: red, black, and white. They are very sweet with a slight musky flavor, and they go bad within hours of picking, so you pretty much have to eat them off the tree, or pick and freeze them very quickly. You never see them fresh in stores.

Lots of groundcherries in the garden last year too, but they mostly got eaten as fast as they could be scooped up after they fell. They grow on low spreading plants, and the berries grow in a papery husk. They are ripe when they fall off the plant. The berries themselves are a golden color. I made a few precious little jars of jam from them, flavored with some chamomile from the garden, and they were delicious and beautiful. The last tiny jar we opened for Christmas morning breakfast. They taste like sweet, firm tomato mixed with pineapple.

Our area grows apples, peaches and pears, and it was a good year, though we had a lot of rain, so they were a tiny bit less flavorful than usual.

Someone from aways south of me gifted me some figs, and they were amazing. One of my favorite fruits, but I live just a little too far north to grow them myself. The flavor is sweet, brown, and goo. The texture is my favorite part, with the skin firm, the outer flesh soft, and the tiny crunchy seeds in the gooey middle.

I was given a bag of local persimmons too. They took forever to ripen, and then they all finally got sweet and squishy on the counter the same day. We ate until we were tired of them, and then the rest got put into quick bread with bananas for Thanksgiving. They are terrible until almost too ripe to eat, so for a few hours they are delicious, then they are overripe and rotten.

A friend grows quince, and they all ripen at once, so I grated some of those and made jam too. Quince are large, like a softball, and the kind she gifted me never gets soft. It tastes like pine sawdust. After cooking for a day with apples, spices and sugar it tastes like pine sawdust with a hint of spiced apples. After cooking two full days and simmering through the night both days, magic happens and it's syrupy, sweet, delicious and complex, with citrus and piney notes in the background. We still have a few jars. It tastes more grown up, for some reason, with a complex flavor that goes well with wintery spices and cheese on a charcuterie board.