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| The Last Raspberry. The BEST One? |
With the end of summer rapidly approaching it does not take much imagination to recognize that if you don't have some garden harvesting in motion and berries picked by now, it may soon be too late. Every fruit has it's season and all that....
Raspberries are a good case in point, and although one may still find some late, tiny wild raspberries in secluded areas shaded from the intense summer sun in the bush, the neat, orderly rows of raspberries in the garden are pretty much finished producing for the year, like it or not.
After harvesting 8 or 10 gallons of raspberries, maybe more, it seems to me the "pick " was clearly finished. For the last couple of weeks there have been a miscellaneous "few here and there types " , not really enough to bother with a container or do an official "pick", but certainly enough for the casual garden-visitor to pause happily and enjoy the sweet fruit---Until today, that is.
Today there was only one raspberry in sight. The last one. I poked around looking under leaves, tenderly moving aside those drying, scratchy old plants that have given their all to produce that final flurry of fruit. I gently push aside the new, green, very tall, stately plants that will produce the fruit next season, making sure they are not damaged. Raspberries DO that. Grow the first year and produce the second year. AT least some types do. The June-bearing "Red ones" like mine do--I can explain that sometime, but I digress; it's hard not to be distracted in the bright August sunshine. See how tall the new plants are? Oh, right, let's not digress.
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| Much taller new growth raspberry plants will be next year's producers |
Back to business, at Incoming Bytes we like to ask the most difficult of questions and from time to time must necessarily wander into alternative fields of interest like insurrection, how to do stuff, and timeless, strange but true philosophical quandarys.
Such is this question: Why does the last raspberry of the year always taste so much better than the first gazillion? Is the last raspberry the Best one? I vote yes.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
