fruit-time

plural fruit-times

1. datedliteraryobsoleteuncountableusuallyThe time when plants bear fruit.

   Radical leaves several at fruit-time ovate;

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

   4 more examples

   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.

   1852, Southern Cultivator and Farming - Volume 10, page 368

   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.

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

   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;

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

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

   1934, T.S. Eliot, New Hampshire

2. broadlyfigurativelyuncountableusuallyThe time when something is mature.

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

   2014, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, Frederick Turner, Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry, page 58