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254 PAL Géza BALOGH — Luca KaszAs — REBEKA MÁRTA Kiss Our team’s largest research project to date was an INTERREG fruit research project that ran from February to November 2021. The first step of our work was to map the old fruit trees of the village, then to collect grafts and budwood for breeding, which were propagated in the nurseries of Marton Drimmer in Sopronkévesd and Ferenc Miské in Kondoros. The core of our research was our summer fieldwork. During these sessions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with elderly residents of Késpallag about their memories and experiences of fruit growing and consumption. Our interviews were guided by Zsolt Szani’s questionnaire on a similar topic (Szani 2014), which our team supplemented beforehand with additional site-specific questions and other ideas that emerged. The ‘fruit’ of our research was a publication titled ‘“7 have the love of the earth...” Fruit cultivation in Késpallag’ (Balogh-Kiss-Gonda-Werlein 2021). At the end of October, we organized the Késpallag Fruit Growers’ Day, where, in addition to presenting of the book, we held several lectures on fruit-growing, round-table discussions, and, in addition to professional programmes, we also offered quizzes, children’s programmes, a dancehouse with csdngé dances and a lunch cooked in a cauldron over an open fire. One of the most rewarding aspects of pomological research was sharing enthusiasm for the subject. The topic of fruit proved to be truly diverse in its simplicity, as everyone has a connection with fruit; beyond the traditional knowledge of agriculture, the topic offered a wealth of life stories, anecdotes, individual experiences, habits and even individual and communal traumas.
