Blackberries

I'm still picking blackberries and making pies, jam and juice. Actually, blackberries alone don't make the best juice but it mixes well with other fruit. I just made some with chokecherries and I'm planning blackberry crabapple juice tonight.... I netted most of my elderberries so the stupidest birds may not get them. Hopefully the other fruit won't get eaten.

Blackberries

I'm now picking my last berries- well maybe not quite as I still should have elderberries, magnolia vine berries and aronia. However, I have quite alot of blackberries to pick that are waiting to be plucked even as I write this. It has been raining much of the day which is not what one wants with dead ripe berries: they tend to mush and rot. Dana and I made several batches of jam combining blackberries with gooseberries and black currants, also we made some sauce or jam combining red currants, gooseberries and black currants which is excellent on ice cream and meet. I've gotten behind in my weeding.

Juicing and Jamming

I am now picking berries and making them into juice or jam full tilt. I've have hired two different people to help me pick black currants and gooseberries and I invited friends of mine to come on three occasions to pick black currants for their yogurt operation. I still have some more black currants to pick and the blackberries are now coming in. It looks like we are going to have a very poor apple year.

Berries are Ripe

I'm planning to start harvesting my black currants this weekend. I've already picked alot of honeyberries (Lonicera caerulea var. edulis) and the only bush lest to go has bad tasting fruit which, I guess, could be OK cooked and I lost all my goumis to birds because I didn't net them enough. Also I picked some red and white currants, gooseberries and black currants which I used to make a very good preserves. My red currants and gooseberries are not very good this year which I believe is because they were defoliated earlier by the currant worms. My blue berries are too poor to worry about protecting.

Weeds

This is my last 6-day week of the year. Starting next week I can start to try to get my garden in shape- I do have two different people who help me weed but things are still out of hand. Hopefully, I can take advantage of the long weekend we are going to have by trying to get my blueberries, currants, gooseberries in shape and also start to weed everything else. Witch grass is my worst weed although I also have one patch of chrysanthemum weed and a big patch of goutweed(which I call evilweed). Deer are also becoming a problem as the Dana's two remaining dogs are now quite ole and are no longer doing their thing.

Honeyberries

Lonicera aerulea var. edulis is very hardy and they taste pretty good. They look sort of like elongated blueberries- when they turn blue you need to wait a few days till you eat them- otherwise they have an unpleasant bitterness. The shrub itself is neat, dense and compact- my tallest one is now six feet tall. Apparently you need two different cultivars to cross pollinate to get fruit. Birds love them as they are my first fruit so this year is the first year I netted them and the first year I got lots of fruit. They are so loaded with berries that the blue is noticable.

Lilac Tea Over

I still haven't completely recovered from our "Lilac Tea"--it went very well and now that it's over, the orange poppies are now in bloom every where in my gardens : the purple of the lilacs goes well with the orange. My Iris is at its peak now-- all my old fashioned varieties which I have been saving for the last 20 years. I have most of my vegetables planted-- all I need to do now is mow (the grass is growing very fast this year) and weed (the weeds, as always, are doing very well.