Picks of the Month

            Like many others, we tend to lose track of time during this season of plague, when one day is pretty much like the last, and the weeks pass by at once very fast and very slowly.  There is a minimal pattern.   Friday is garbage pick-up.  Recycling comes around every other Monday.  High summer should mean some official attempt at “vacation,” probably one of our rare but always much enjoyed visits to the Jersey shore.  That was, long ago, an actual plan.  We had reserved a place big enough to accommodate us and our Montrealers for a few days in July.  Then they closed the beaches and (more importantly) the Canadian border, and though both are now partially opening by fits and starts, we long since had to cancel.

            But one calendrical constant remains reassuring.  So far as I can tell, important parts of the natural world are oblivious to Covid-19.  Old Man River—he just keeps rollin’ along.  The same can be said, fortunately, for the realm of botany.  Grass keeps growing, and my lawn requires its weekly trim.

            I wrote in a couple of earlier posts about the bamboo, which launched its spring attack, as though animated by clockwork, in the first ten days of May.  And despite its heat, the month of July has been particularly comforting this year in the timely flourishing of my two backyard fruits, raspberries and grapes, the one wild and the other cultivated—sort of.

            There are several varieties of wild raspberries, including a prolific invader, but the most common one, certainly in these parts, is the north American varietal of the rubus idaeus, usually called the “American red raspberry.”  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the learned adjective idaeus there refers to the famous Mount Ida, the highest point on Crete, a mount sacred to the goddess Rhea, whose counterpart in the Roman world was the Magna Mater and in the Christian system the Virgin Mary.  I presume raspberries grow (or once grew) on the mountain’s sunny slopes, allowing a pretty good pedigree for such a common comestible; and certainly raspberry fool is divine.

            The native raspberry plant likes plenty of water during the early spring months, and its ambitious roots prefer a friable soil amended with compost.  In our neighborhood the latter condition is frequently achieved naturally, as it were, by large accumulations of decaying leaf and dead wood left untouched for years around the edges where timber-line and mowed field meet.  And this year we had a lot of spring rain.  I could tell two months ago that there would likely be a bumper crop of berries.  So it has proved to be.  Rubus, which sounds like it ought to mean “red”, is actually the generic name for bramble bushes, especially blackberries.  We do have wild blackberries here, too, but they are far less common than raspberries, and for some reason the local ones at least bear mainly stunted berries.

            This year there is a bountiful raspberry harvest to be had within a hundred and fifty yards of my house, some of it in my own yard.  I am amazed that none of my neighbors show any interest in the freebee delicacies surrounding us.  There does remain of course a keen competition for this succulent food between bird and man, with each side having its advantages.  The birds, naturally, are greatly favored.  There are many, many more of them.  They fly.  Their vision is amazing.  It is rare to come upon ripe berries on a bush that does not also reveal the evidence of previous avian scavengers, the tell-tale sign being the tiny, conspicuously bare pale yellow cones from which the berries have been plucked.  The principal human advantage is our comparatively gargantuan size and strength, and above all our ability to penetrate and probe the interstices of bushes impenetrable by our feathered friends.   It is not easy to pick berries while wearing gloves, and should the picker happen to be an old guy on a blood thinner, the sanguinary results, though superficial, may appear rather dramatic.

            The wild raspberry is small, and seedier than its commercial counterpart, but also more authentic in its sweetness.  However. it takes a lot of them to make a pie, so that efficiency in the gathering becomes an issue.  First you have to establish in your mind a color benchmark.  The darker the berry the riper and sweeter it will be.  If you have any doubt about a berry, leave it; it will be ready in another full day of sun if you return.  Next, operate according to the “spilled milk” principle: make only one swipe at any single fruit.  If you miss or if the berry falls to the ground, simply go on to the next.  You need to maintain a sense, even if an illusory one, of steady, unbroken, inexorable progress.  I learned this tip as a child from an old man who had done time in the Missouri state penitentiary, where he developed a whole philosophy of life based in his compelled cotton picking.   Always prefer the bunches to the singletons.  On many inner sprigs you will be surprised by bright crimson clusters of as many as ten ripe berries.  Here the trick is to make gravity your friend by placing your gathering receptacle precisely beneath the cluster so that when with one finger you nudge the fruit free from the stem it falls into captivity rather than through the brambles to the ground.

            More or less in synch with the reddening of the berries is the purpling of our Concord grapes.  We have many semi-wild vines, all of them originating from a single root wrested twenty years ago from the ruins of an abandoned communal garden once attached to a now razed apartment house.  I don’t know whether you can properly call these “heirloom” plants; maybe “recycled” is more accurate.  It is practically impossible to kill these hardy grapes, but you would be wrong to underestimate my abilities in this line.  Mostly I have them trailing over stone walls and climbing trees, but I do have one especially constructed trellis.  Though this year I didn’t get around to pruning its vines properly in April, it still seems to be really loaded.  The fruit, however, is notoriously susceptible to some kind of blight that hardens as many as half the grapes in what starts out as a big, luscious bunch.  I’m afraid I am an anti-vaxer when it comes to the back yard. 

            There are still new worlds to conquer.  On Monday we were at our son Richard’s fabulous place near Frenchtown.  He has discovered a nearby forest of chanterelle mushrooms, apparently huge in its extent.  Only once in my years of local mushrooming in Princeton have I encountered chanterelles, and they were given to me by a friend who found a modest mess of them in a residential area on a new construction site.  In my view, chanterelles are the fungal gold standard, and I am reanimated to search further around here.  But that is for another day or, perhaps, another life.  Just now what I seek is some kind of convincing temporal grounding.  Yesterday I encountered my first seriously overripe berry.  That would mean it is pretty close to the middle of July.

Hunterdon County chanterelles, processed and preserved by R. A. Fleming (July 2020)