Berries and Skies

Hi all, I took a short break from posting last week so I could enjoy a week off. But I was still busy taking photos and picking wild raspberries (at last). Based on last year's berry post, the berries were a little late this year. But they still taste just as sweet.

First, the cloud pictures:

And the berries:

The first pickings are usually a little slim, but now there are tons of berries to be had! Yum, yum! Maybe this year I'll finally make some wild raspberry jam!

Rain

Well, we finally got some, and it looks like the raspberries survived pretty well, though we did lose some. A number of them simply did not grow bigger due to the lack of rain.

Berry berry nice

Our third raspberry harvest:

Quite an increase from just a day or two ago.

Here's what they look like in one of those gallon ziplock bags so you get a better idea of how many we actually picked.

And this is just the beginning. I'm sure I'll come up with some creative recipes to use all those berries in.

Berry picking season again

Our first crop of wild raspberries is in:

Doesn't seem like much right now, but there are hundreds of berries out there, waiting to ripen and be picked! We'll be out there picking every day for the next couple of weeks I imagine. I noticed quite a few are growing so close to the ground that the grass is hiding them. We had a lot of rain this Spring, so the crop is plentiful. I might just try my hand at making raspberry jam or preservatives this year. There was a coupon in the paper recently for the canning supplies, so why not?

I noticed there are a lot of bugs around them too, they look like baby praying mantis. They don't appear to be eating or damaging the fruit, and they haven't bitten me when I've touched them unawares, so I leave them alone. Praying mantis are good for the garden. Maybe next time I'm out there I'll try to snap a picture of one and post it on here. Wonder if I could knit a raspberry. Hmmm....

Berry-pickin

Today I went berry picking in the backyard. We have wild raspberries growing all over the place. When we first moved, I was suspicious of eating wild foods. But then I finally tried one and ummm! They were good! And I didn't die. So we eat them every year. Now because of all the rain we have a bumper crop of them: