June 24th Harvest

Today I was going on an errand and saw a few ripe black raspberries.

 We have five or six patches of black raspberries the birds have planted in various places, and when I checked them later, I found a few more ripe ones. 

 

I’m not sure what the difference is, but there is one patch that produces raspberries probably the size of my thumbnail, but they’re somewhat shadowed, so it will be maybe a week before they ripen.  But I may take a few photos of them once they do just to show them off.

I also picked some red and even purple raspberries.

 

Purple raspberries are some hybrid between red and black.  They taste like red raspberries, but it does seem that they start out a normal raspberry shape, but once they ripen they get somewhat deformed.  Someone with more interest and time than I can figure out why.  But it does seem that a few years ago, there were only a couple plants, but it seems I’m finding more each year.  Maybe someday, I’ll keep them separate to make purple raspberry jelly, but for now I just lump them in with the red ones. 

You can also see some blueberries in there.  These aren’t the first blueberries I’ve picked, that was last Friday.  But my sister and I were watering the blueberries and we saw a few were ripe, but they didn’t last long enough to get photographed.

I also picked a small fraction of the red currants that are ripe.

 

All last week I meant to spend an evening picking currants, but by the time it cooled down, it was time to water the garden and by the time that was done it was dark.  It did rain some yesterday, so we didn’t need to water tonight, so I finally was able to pick some.  But there are a lot more that need picked.  I just stopped because I was tired.

While I was picking currants, I also harvested a couple of things I didn’t want to: Japanese beetles.

 

These were the first ones I’ve seen this summer.  I put them in a container of water so their wings are wet and they can’t fly.  I then feed them to our chickens.