Gardeners' Holidays 2021: Berry Fest

Technically, the Gardeners' Holiday for June 2021 should have been last Sunday, on the summer solstice itself. But we spent that whole day out of town celebrating Fathers' Day with my dad, so we weren't able to spend any time in the garden or eat anything harvested from it. So this year's Berry Fest is coming a week late.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of raspberries left on the canes to celebrate. We're harvesting between half a cup and a cup per day right now, and there are still lots of berries left that have yet to ripen. We'll probably be gathering in this first crop for another couple of weeks at least before it peters out, and then we'll have the second harvest to enjoy in September. In fact, if anything, the canes might be growing a little too well; the area inside our raspberry trellis is turning into a bit of a jungle. Brian went out today and pulled a bunch of stray suckers that had sprouted outside the boundaries of the bed, but when it's time to prune out last year's canes, we'll probably have to remove some of this year's as well just so we can reach everything.

We also have a new berry harvest to celebrate this year. Despite the fact that two of our honeyberry bushes perished last winter and we only replaced one of them, we have already managed to harvest about half a cup of berries off the four survivors. The bird netting we put over the plants seems to be succeeding in keeping away marauders (both two-legged and four-legged), but the gaps in it are big enough to allow us to slip a couple of fingers in to pick the berries that appear biggest and ripest. We aren't yet getting a large enough crop to justify taking the netting off completely and covering the ground with cardboard so we can shake the berries down onto it, but according to the FAQ at Honeyberry USA, we can expect to reach that point in another year or two.

And, to round out this fruit fest, we're beginning to get our first few plums of the season. Most of the ones on the trees are still green, and most of the ones that have fallen on the ground haven't been in any shape for eating, but a few of the ones we've gathered from around the base of the Opal appeared to be full-sized and close enough to ripeness to make them worth trying. We also picked up a bunch of slightly smaller or harder ones that looked like they had at least begun to blush before they fell, so we are keeping those outside the fridge to see if they ripen up enough to eat. 

At any rate, it is a reassuring sign that there are plums on the trees that are surviving long enough to ripen. Despite weekly spraying with copper fungicide, we haven't completely licked the brown rot; we're still seeing quite a few plums either drop prematurely or turn into brownish "mummies" on the branch. But at least there are some that have stayed healthy and haven't been toted away by squirrels. I'm not counting my plums before they're hatched, but there is at least a chance that the harvest from the three trees — first the Opal, then the Mount Royal, and finally the Golden Gage — will keep us in fresh fruit until our second crop of raspberries comes in.

As it happens, we're not actually doing anything special with all this fruit today in honor of the Gardeners' Holiday. We haven't yet managed to find an ideal alternative to whipped cream for a raspberry fool, and failing that, the most satisfying thing I could think of to do with all these berries was to eat them straight up. But we are including a little of our garden produce in tonight's dinner: some summer lettuce for a salad and one tiny fingerling zucchini, the first of the season, which we can fry up with a little garlic as an appetizer. And the raspberries will get their star turn next month, as Brian has already turned one batch of them into jam for this year's anniversary cake.

While he was at it, in fact, he even made some jam from berries that weren't actually grown on our property. He has now gone back to working on campus part of the time, and one afternoon during his lunch break he decided to wander off in search of the nearby pawpaw patch he discovered a few years back. The pawpaws weren't ripe yet, but he discovered there was a large mulberry tree right next to them and gleaned about a pint of fresh berries from it. (Pro tip: full-strength vinegar turns out to be good for removing mulberry stains from a handkerchief that's been used as a berry container.) After we scarfed these down, he decided to go back for a second batch and try turning it into jam. He didn't can it, just cooked it down and stuck it in the fridge for future use. So if we really want a fruit-based dessert to make our Berry Fest dinner complete, we can always try a bit of that on some toast.