One of the joys of having autumn-fruiting raspberries rather than the more usual summer-fruiting canes is that one can enjoy fresh fruit well into the last few months of the year. I should have been picking still over the last weeks but rain had spoiled the fruit and it was not until yesterday that I was able to get any more. There weren't all that many berries, but I gathered what there were and took them indoors to find, most serendipitously, that the Old Bat had already decided on fruit salad for dessert. Those raspberries went particularly well with it.
I also picked a lot more apples, but only after starting to prune the tree. This has grown far too big and, because I have not pruned it well in the past, I was unable to pick the fruit from the upper branches as I couldn't get a ladder in place. So I had to cut a few branches away before I could really get going on the remains of the harvest. There is still some fruit on the tree and some branches to be cut back. In the meantime, there are a good few more pounds of apples (Bramleys - a cooking variety) for the Old Bat to freeze or give away. The problem is that most of the people we know who would appreciate home-grown apples have their own trees. I'm sorry to say that at least half our crop this year has already been allowed to rot down as compost.
Apart from more pruning, my next job is to get half a forest (well, it seems like that) to the tip.
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One of the small thrills of my life came as a child. I and a few friends were exploring vacant lots and whatnot in our neighborhood, and, behind a liquor store, we found wild raspberry and blackberry bushes. They were off in a corner of the lot, obscured by old packing cartons and other debris. We picked cups full of them and brought them home with us, and we enjoyed the sweets all the more for having ferreted them out ourselves!
There used to be several spots around here where I could pick wild raspberries (which have an altogether better flavour than the cultivated ones) but unfortunately all the canes have been grubbed up or have just disappeared. Still plenty of blackberries, though.
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