Could Pass for a Raspberry

A hen can fly straight up.  How high she can go depends on the raspberries.  Fortunately, our raspberry canes this year are lush and loaded, with huge green leaves sheltering the fruit from the up-turned eyes of four chickens.  Get a bead on a berry, and they go straight up.

Mostly the girls occupy themselves during the day with whatever is directly in front of them as they drift like sheep around and around their spacious hen pen.  But as the first of the morning Things I get to do today, I'm gathering fruit for our breakfast, and the lovelies hang right at my feet, well trained in the knowing that berries slip from my fingers.  An intermittent flattering of wings tells me one of them spied an accessible treat and has flown three feet or more straight up to grab it.  Shooing them away is futile, and I realize they really deserve all they can reach.  After all it was their scratching, their fertilizing, their picking off bugs that has made the berry patch seven feet tall with all the berries as big as my thumbs.

Could pass for raspberries in the eyes of a hen.

Two minutes later it seemed one of the hens was walking on my exposed toes (flip flops are my default garden wear).  A glance down told the story: it was a sharp beak pecking at my toes.  Raspberry toenail polish can fool even a clever hen.

Cornucopian

The first time I noticed it, I almost went weak-kneed.  It was so sweet, so perfect, so rich.  A single cane from the raspberries has created an archway over the gate.  That cane is loaded with berries in all stages of ripening.  They hang like finely detailed lanterns overhead as I enter the raspberry patch.

Could be painted on the edge of a tea cup!

The top two feet of the raspberry stalk is the most tender and least able to support itself. Add to that the fact that with the help of water and aspects related to chickens, the canes have grown to eight feet talk--most of them. Some are closer to ten.

Autumn Gold's need another week to get their glow.

So they arch over in a most inviting and cornucopian style.  Applying restraint to allow the berries to ripen--Things I get to do today.  Eat them whether they are ripe enough or not--Things I get to do today!

Raspberry Recycle

Everything can be put to good use.  In my dream world that is true.  When it actually happens that a natural waste product has a beneficial second life, I'm blissed out.

The fresh green of this year's growth.

So collecting my bliss is top of the Things I get to do today in the berry patch.  The raspberries are finished after four weeks of generous gifts to our table and tummies and a few into the freezer.  The last few pickings were not very much fun with the new canes hanging every-which-way, getting in the way and risking being broken off, brittle as they are.  Removing the just-finished-baring canes feels good as I put the patch in order and give this year's canes space and support for their fall crop.

These grew up last summer, released their first berries in
the fall, and just finished blessing us with this year's crop.

Mulch is a gift to the new growth, holding moisture and releasing its nutrients back into the soil.  As I collected the spent canes, their yet-healthy-and-green leaves caught my attention.

Old leaves stuffed between the canes as mulch.  Do not do this
if there is disease or rust of any kind on your raspberry leaves.

They snapped easily and quickly from the stalks.  A generous fistful was tucked between the canes and snugged to the ground.  All the spent leaves stripped, and all of them used for mulch.  Bliss.

When All Good Things Come Together

Regular red Raspberries, Autumn Gold Raspberries, Blue
Berries and Marionberries just waiting for their
cream and sugar

It's called a convergence.  When things all come together, the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts.  So add a splash of cream and a half teaspoon of sugar and your have a harmonious convergence of flavors and delight.


I love, love, love this time of year when all the berries in my yard overlap their sweet ripeness and play out their colors and textures on my tongue.  It's the best of the best.  Most delightful of the Things I get to do today is bask in the goodness of it all.

A Party

It's Karen's birthday, and we had a party!  She lives on the East Coast, and we are on the West. Speaker phones are perfect.  We had her on the phone in the middle of the table while we sang the usual birthday song and ate dinner. Hard to give her a birthday hug through the phone, but it was lovely to have her voice joining us in our celebration.

Birthday Party!

Our dessert in her honor was Angel Food Cake drizzled with fresh Raspberry Puree and a side of Mexican Strawberry Chocolate Ice Cream*.  Besides being grateful for these lovely Things I get to do today in her behalf, the excuse to make this ice cream was most welcome. Thank you, Karen! May you enjoy this coming year to the fullest.









*Mexican Strawberry Chocolate Ice Cream

2 Cups whipping cream divided.

Strawberry Puree mixing with cream and sugar and cinnamon

3/4 Cup sugar
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
Dash of salt

Heat one cup of the cream with the sugar, cinnamon and salt.  Bring to a boil. Cool completely. Add the remaining cup of cream. Stir in

2 Cups pureed fresh or frozen strawberries
2 Tablespoon of white rum

Chill well before freezing.
Freeze in a 2 quart ice cream maker.  Just before the ice cream is firm enough, drizzle in

2 Ounces of melted dark chocolate.  The churning of the ice cream will cause the chocolate to form thin chards through out.

Potato Pro, Raspberry Pro

I'm not tooting my own horn here.  I'm not a professional anything.  This is all about keeping things safe.  We've talked about garden pro not that long ago when the girls were still on the loose in the yard and when the squirrels were digging me an opportunity to plant onions twice.

Keeping busy feet at bay

Big-hearted chicken lover that I am, I suffer a twinge (is it guilt?) when the hens do not have full free range of all our property.  Well, not the front yard--there's no fence there.  So recently my extra tomato cages became potato pro(tection).   Two by two lumber from an old bean trellis found itself in the Things I get to do today to hinder the frenzied feet of the girls at the base of my raspberry rows.

Cages just laid on the bed--spaces too open and vulnerable

But back to the tomato cages.  I'm very opinionated on this subject, I'll warn you up front.  The round wire funnel cages, in my opinion, are nothing short of a nuisance, especially in the off season.  My preference is the kind that are about three and a half feet tall and 14 inches square.  At the end of the season, they fold flat.  15 of them take not space at all, it seems.  But even this kind can be worthless if they are made cheaply with light-weight wire.  A good wind will take them and your tomatoes right over like a pile of angry coat hangers in a wrestling match.

Cages opened, linked and offset with 6-7" openings.

Somehow I acquired half a dozen or so of this cheapo kind.  And when the potatoes needed help these worthless wires were shanghaied into service.  I unlinked the hooks that made them square, creating a flat open mesh, then linked half of them all together to cover the long bed.  Did the same with the rest and laid them offset so that the "mesh" has about 6" openings in instead of 12".


There's a use for everything if you let your creativity ramble about in the vicinity of an idea that's looking for an answer.

Signs

I used to do it every year somewhere around the 21st.  The 21st sounds like spring.  My thing was that I usually started looking for signs of it around the 21st of January or the 21st of February.  By March the signs were the size of billboards so it was silly to say you were looking.  By then everybody could see it.

Raspberry sorbet in its infancy

So it was shocking to me this morning as I was sweeping and vacuuming and generally tidying up in the hen yard (hyperbole intended for those of you who may think I'm over the top on this neatness thing) that the raspberry canes were wriggling out vigorous shoots that would soon be branchlets 18" long with leaves and flowers and then soft, fat, sweet, warm berries, all this tucked into a slow motion explosion of life.

 Brunnera
  First out and last in--a full-season bloomer

A quick take around: the yard indeed looked like a billboard worthy of spring documentation.

Striped Iris

Tulip cup filled to the brim with Oregon rain

Lush moss

This is the most heady of Things I get to do today:  "page" through the leaves of my own yard "catalog" and bask in the elegant rush of life on all sides--Spring.

A dance of Delphiniums

Day Lilies

The Picking is Easy

Raspberries are a summer crop—sometime in July in my town usually.  But picking them in summer is not my favorite thing.  They tend to hide behind the leaves, or if they are too ripe, drop on the ground to be snatched up by a waiting chicken just as my reach meets the berry.

No, my favorite time to pick raspberries is in the fall when the vigorous new canes have stretched to their max and still have enough energy to throw out a spray of honeybee-attracting flowers on the top foot of the cane.  These flowers turn into berries and ripen starting in September when everything else is slowing down.  They hang like tantalizing bunches of grapes, easy to pick and begging to be touched by hand and mouth.

So the first of the Things I get to do today, even before I look at the list, is to be in the berry patch, before the sun is fully awake and longing to kiss the fruit, with my container on my belt as I delight in the abundance of this harvest.  Picking is easy now.