Well, it's officially summertime (now not that the summer time weather waited for the calendar), and our garden is asking masses higher than it became last 12 months. Our sugar snap peas had been generating?No longer thru the bucketload, but enough to provide handfuls of peas for stir-fries and salads?And we are harvesting lots lettuce that I'm genuinely getting a hint bored with salad. There's however a bit of arugula left, as properly (although it is possibly to bolt quite quickly), and we're already seeing the primary little squashlings on the zucchini flora. (Brian has been diligently shielding their stems with dirt to discourage the squash vine borers, and to date they appearance wholesome.)
But the real big name of our summer season lawn show is our raspberry canes. For reasons that are not truely clear to me, we had been getting a actual bumper crop of berries this summer season?So many who we certainly haven't been capable of devour all of them. Last weekend, we went away to Boston for a Morris dance event, and we made a point of choosing all the ripe raspberries we should discover on Friday?Approximately a pint's really worth?And taking them with us as a gift for our host, due to the truth we knew they could no longer final till we once more. So the wooden have been picked smooth proper earlier than our departure, and but the day when we again, Brian went out and accrued these sorts of.
That's a -quart bowl, so I estimate it consists of at least 5 cups of berries?And that is what we picked after a lack of most effective days. We came about to be at Trader Joe's final week, and we observed that they have been promoting a tiny one-cup field of organic raspberries there for $4?So this bowl on my own includes approximately $20 properly worth of fruit. And because of the fact that then, the canes have best continued to provide on the same rate. We're filling up a pint box of berries pretty an entire lot each day.
Well, with a crop like this, we had to make some modifications to our berry-ingesting behavior. In the beyond, we were pretty sparing with them?Tossing a handful at a time into a salad, every so often taking element in a half of-cup or so glowing with lunch, and maybe saving a few as lots as make into a dessert now and then. But this week, we had been doing all the ones things immediately, plus filling up a quart container to take to my dad for a belated Father's Day gift, and nonetheless we cannot preserve up.
So, for the primary time in our gardening lives, we've genuinely preserved part of our fruit harvest. Brian has now positioned batches of berries, totaling about a quart and a half of, into the freezer, really spreading them out in a unmarried layer on a cookie sheet. They freeze up brief and hold their shape, and he then transfers them to a large plastic bag for future use.
This, of path, technique that we can ought to start digging up some recipes that sincerely call for frozen raspberries, which we've never had earlier than, however it is not often a tragedy. I've already located this one for Raspberry, Oat and Almond Bake in the Guardian, and we are able to constantly positioned them in smoothies.
Meanwhile, there are nonetheless more clean raspberries accessible to be harvested. If this continues up, perhaps we have to simply forget about approximately looking for fruit in any respect until fall.
