A day’s harvest

This is what I picked on Thursday, June 13th.

On the left are the first wild strawberries I’ve picked this year.  One year, I did manage to pick enough to make a batch of jam, but that was a looooot of work.  We might have a ton of strawberries growing in our fields, but I have 8,000 other projects.  These will end up mixed in with boughten strawberries for shortcake or jam.  On the right are some red raspberries.  I picked the first raspberries a couple days ago, but I forgot to get a picture of them because I was trying to do twenty other things.

This is the third, or fourth harvest of currants I’ve gotten, but the first ones were just two or three.  There are a lot more that are half-ripe, which I’ll have to pick next week.  If the birds don’t eat them first. 

What I do with all these berries is freeze them, then sometime this fall my mom and I will make jelly out of them.  If I pick enough red raspberries, we’ll make a red raspberry batch.  If there isn’t enough juice for one batch, my mom will mix in some currant juice to fill it out.  And if we don’t have enough of everything, we’ll just mix everything – currants, red raspberries, black raspberries, blackberries – into one mixed berry jelly.