fruit-time

English

Noun

fruit-time (usually uncountable, plural fruit-times)

1. (dated, obsolete, literary) The time when plants bear fruit.
   • 1852, Southern Cultivator and Farming - Volume 10, page 368:

     To one underneath the canopy, and looking upward in fruit time, the berries, as thick as hops, and as large as musket balls, appear hanging in clusters of three to nine or ten and sometimes more.

   • 1882, Joseph Dalton Hooker, The Flora of British India - Volume 3, page 212:

     Radical leaves several at fruit-time ovate;

   • 1892, Gregory of Nyssa, translated by William Moore, Henry Austin Wilson, NPNF2-05. Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Etc.:

     it would be a foolish man who should seek to hurry on the coming of the fruit-time, when he ought to be sowing seeds and preparing the crops for himself by diligent care; for the fruit-time will surely come, whether he wishes or not, at the appointed time; and it will be looked on differently by him who has secured for himself beforehand abundance of crops, and by him who is found by the fruit-time desitute of all preparation.

   • 1901, Alice Morse Earle, Old Time Gardens: Newly Set Forth, page 196:

     Plantations of healthy Cherry trees are lovely in flower and fruit time, whether in Japan or Massachusetts, and a Cherry tree is full of happy child memories;

   • 1934, T.S. Eliot, New Hampshire:

     Children's voices in the orchard Between the blossom- and the fruit-time: Golden head, crimson head, Between the green tip and root.

2. (by extension, figurative) The time when something is mature.
   • 2014, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, Frederick Turner, Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry, page 58:

     Thence come songs whose fruit-time will inherit Butterflies from my light-hearted spirit.