I don't suppose many of you have considered berry poisoning recently.
This is an extraordinary season for berries - or at least it is on my patch. Those that know me know that I tend to work on a theory of 'it's better to have too much'. And on the theory that if I plant enough then even in bad years I'll have enough.
I had a massive fruit set this year. Now and again i wonder about buying or building a fruit cage but whenever i look at the costs to cover the amount of stuff I've got planted I quickly realise that i could buy enough fruit for a life-time for the cost of the cage. Most years I end up with the pittance the birds leave me but for some reason this year it's different. I have wondered whether Brexit plays a part with fewer migrant birds. Or whether it's just down to millennial birds being too lazy to pick their own fruit?
I have a lot of lawn and most years i spend a couple of hours every summer day keeping up with the mowing on the ride-on. With the dry weather of late I've had a nice break from doing it... the grass just isn't growing but with the recent rain and flowering stalks coming up everywhere I thought I'd snick over some of it to tidy up.
My day started with a trip to the berry bushes. You all know how it goes; one for the bowl and one for my tummy (repeat). I can just about top and tail a kilo of blackcurrants in two hours of watching silly tv repeats on my PC or how-to-do youtube vids. Bt I've got several kilos in the freezer now and still 2/3rds of my blackcurrant bushes are unpicked. I've been eating the blueberries as fast as they ripen. I love blueberries. But even they have got beyond me this year and the first kilo got frozen yeaterday. So this morning I started out collecting the recently ripened blueberries and, for a change, I went with redcurrants and whitecurrants - all for topping and tailing later.
So out came the ride-on mower. As I say i have some 3 acres of lawn and planned on half of that. Naturally it's go round in circles - well as circular as one can with all the tree islands and my shrubbery. I included the old original orchard in the run which is where the problems started. The old orchard is behind the raspberry patch and we all know how those things spread. So there were a lot of extraneous raspberry canes about and they had some really nice berries on them. It's easy to stop the rid-on and pick and eat - I did.
As I continued my circuit I discovered a wild cherry tree also laden. One expects those to be sour but .. ya gotta try. They were very sweet - so i ate some more. The problem with those wild cherries it that suddenly you get the bitter aftertaste and the only solution was to drive to the gooseberries to take the taste away.
Mowing on I got the orchardy bit done as part of the circuit and that meant the back side of the raspberry patch. The red ones are at their prime but the yellows have started ripening too and they needed testing.
With that section finished I did the runs by the new soft bush patch I planted when we moved here. Now I'd been through that this morning but somehow there's a different perspective from the ride-on and a lot more blueberries that I'd missed earlier. Did I mention i love blueberries? Yes? Well I ate them rather than miss them later. I did restrain myself from eating any red or white currants becaue I like to test my resolve.
Mowing on further I just happened past the dark brown gooseberries and I hadn't had any of those for a few days - until today. And very nice they were too. And we carried on cutting grass. This now brought me to the front of the raspberry patch and to my suprise the thornless blackberry had some ripe berries. I never get any of those - the birds really love them usually. So i got in quick before they noticed.
My tummy hurts.
Topic: Story from the present - Soft fruit (Read 1691 times)
