The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!
A Year of Noticing - Day 295
Some may disagree, but for me, this is the most wonderful time of the year! All of my very favourite seasonal fruits are slowly coming into season - and there are few things in life better than eating warm, fresh fruit straight from the plant or tree!
I have many very early memories of picking fresh peaches, apricots, cherries and plums straight from the tree, juices dripping down my chin and arms as I voraciously enjoyed the fruit - it was a full body experience!
Most of my favourite fruits have very short growing seasons, and to eat them locally (or somewhat locally - now if I’m going to each fresh peaches or plums they will need to travel a little ways across the country), is pure bliss.
The end of strawberry season is quickly coming to an end here, and I wanted to get out to pick some fresh berries before they were gone for another year! On rare occasions, the growing season of strawberries and raspberries overlap for a few days at the local u-pick farms… and this was one of those years!
First, I picked the delicious heart berries - strawberries, with their delectable sweet taste, and some of them just fell off the stem and needed to be eaten immediately, or they wouldn’t have lasted in the basket. Yum!
After our baskets of strawberries were full, we wandered over to the raspberry patch at the small, family-run u-pick berry farm we chose to visit, and navigated the prickly bushes to find the deliciously sweet, but tart raspberries.
There is such delight in “one for the basket, one for me” style of picking… and it feels like a great reward for picking your own berries! It also astounds me how long it takes to pick, and I wonder how the price of berries in the grocery store is as low as it is. My children were trying to figure out if there could be a machine that might pick raspberries, without crushing them and finding only the ripe ones… and they figured they must all be picked by hand. How are hundreds of thousands of raspberries picked everyday? And they are so delicate… how do they survive the travel?
As the flavour of a fresh, warm raspberry swirls in my mouth, I am grateful that these are able to grow here, for me to pick, eat, and enjoy as I savour all parts of this most wonderful time of the year!
xo
You can find all the previous posts in A Year of Noticing right HERE.
Sounds wonderful Heidi! 🍓 One of many fondest childhood memories of visiting my grandparents was picking raspberries from their large garden in the back yard and then enjoyjng them with fresh cream with my grandma. 😍 The enjoyment of it all often comes flooding back to me when I spot a bush in someone's garden or taste a raspberry from a wild bush I might pass by while on a walk! 🤗😊