Berry Season

Every year the strawberries send out new runners, and last year I relocated many of the offshoots to the edges of my garden, where we can find and pick the berries. So this year, we were blessed with lots of strawberries for the month of June. I think they're pretty much done, now, but for a while I was picking a big bowl about every 2nd day.

Now the raspberries are in full swing. My golden raspberries are especially sweet and delicious, not quite as tart as the red ones.

Since we hosted a BBQ yesterday, I didn't pick the raspberries for a few days, so there would be lots for the visiting kids to pick. But even though I saw some kids picking, there were still lots for me to find today:

My Morello sour cherry had an impressive display of fruit this year, considering we only bought him last year:

The birds don't seem to touch the sour cherries. And surprisingly, I was able to pick three ripe Rainier cherries this year (I ate one before thinking to take the photo below). The Lapin cherry at the back of the yard was stripped clean by birds, or possibly even a raccoon again (although thankfully, no broken branches this year).

We also have grapes for the first time this year. It has taken a few years for the vines (which started from a cutting) to establish. I hope that the grapes will be good for eating, but the garden trading friend who gave them to me wasn't sure what variety they were. So we'll see.

Gardening is always full of surprises. I had a single raspberry plant appear (unintentionally) in the wild area of my upper garden (stay tuned for my garden renovation project which hopefully will take place this summer...). I guess it showed up last year. Of course, I planned to relocate it with the other raspberries, or give it away, but still haven't gotten around to it yet. So I was very pleasantly surprised by the huge and sweet berries it is bearing this year. See photo below, where the huge berries are on the right, and my other red raspberries on the left, for comparison. It would seem that this raspberry which sprung up, is of a commercial variety. The berries are also more firm.

I hope to renovate my raspberry area later this year also, now that I see how much fruit it is bearing. The way it is overgrown now with other plants (such as my chocolate mint), it is hard to get in to pick the berries, and many of the smaller canes have fallen forward onto the lawn. There is certainly never a shortage of projects to do in the garden, but that's quite fine by me.