syrup.

black pepper, butter!, cream.

with more potato salad on the side.

And the season has begun! I harvested a cup of black raspberries off of one precocious floricane (the second year for a cane, black raspberries only produce berries on two year old canes, not the first year primocanes) over at Dad's house after cutting down a bunch of thistle that had sprung up and started crowding the raspberries. So there will be a few sweaty weeks of mosquito bites as I push into the various patches we've established over the two yards to get as many of those lovely little bundles of antioxidants as I can, then the great squeezing as they all go through the food mill to produce lovely thick juice with which to make the jelly.

off one cane, too!

I have the land. I wish I'd done this years ago so I could be doing what you're doing.

Well, not the thistle part.



Cher

a decade or a decade and a half or so ago, started one patch. Birds munching on the berries have helped start the others But they're big tangled messes, not the neatly contained patches in rows, with espaliers, that you might see at a commercial grower's. So there's always a lot of fruit I can't reach, that I hope the birds are getting some use out of. I keep meaning to get some canes started up in pots, so that I can gift them off to friends and neighbours to start their own patches, but I've just not gotten around to it so far.

And these aren't the thornless kind either, so I'll have plenty of stabs and scratches to go with the mosquito bites by the time the patches are cleaned out, especially since I often go out to pick shirtless, since I usually am drenched in sweat by the time I'm done picking for any given day, so it seems a waste to dirty a shirt before showering.

Salad.