I mentioned the raspberry growth behind my garden already, there is even a picture in one of the older posts. Here is a new one.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It is just outside my garden, on the east side of the fence. It is an ideal spot for raspberries – they get full morning sun, but as the day gets hotter in the afternoon, they become shielded by my copicce poplars.
It is a mixed growth of probably domesticated, wild, and hybrid raspberries. Some shoots have prickles, most do not; some have fruits consisting of a lot of small drupelets, some of just a few big ones. Technically, it does not belong to me, but I take care of it and harvest most of the fruit. And anyone who goes by can harvest that fruit as well, and nobody, not even the owner of the meadow, can object to that. The Czech Republic has roaming laws about accessibility to landscapes, so a meadow is freely walkable unless it is currently being grazed by cattle or for similar safety reasons. And wild fruits and mushrooms are a common good that anyone can take. So even when these raspberries technically grow on someone else’s property, I am neither trespassing nor stealing.
Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell, some of the new forest and meadow owners tried to restrict public access to their land. Yet others tried to collect fees from people who took wild fruit or mushrooms. There was a very public education campaign teaching people what is and is not allowed.
I also have to mow the grass about 1 to 1,5 m adjacent to my fence. The owner uses the meadows surrounding my house mostly for hay production, and the tractor cannot mow that close. And even when they used the meadows as pastures, there was a gap between the electric fence and my property that I still had to mow. That is how the growth got established in the first place when I was a kid – my father did not mow the grass around the garden, nor did the tractors, and thus raspberries took hold.
Occasionally, I flatten and subsequently fertilize the whole growth to rejuvenate it, forgoing that year’s harvest. But this is one of those years when I have a huge harvest.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The fruit is so aromatic that even my stunted sense of smell can enjoy it.
We have several kg of fruit already, and we should get even more in the next week or so. Luckily, we finally got some rain, and although it was not much, raspberries did benefit from it. I cannot water them; that would really be too much strain on my water resources.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
So far, most of the fruit goes into the freezer. Once the harvest is over, it will be thawed, juice pressed out of it, and cooked into jam that lasts for years. However, I did take about 1 kg and dehydrated it.
Dehydrated raspberries are not very good food. They are sour and have the consistency of coarse sand. So why make them? Because I plan to mix them with sweet dehydrated pears in the fall, put the mix into a food processor and blend them together. The resulting powder makes for a very tasty and aromatic fruit tea in the winter.
When we lived in Sheffield we had raspberry gluts most years, I could pick for an hour or so and end up with 4kg of raspberries despite the dogs we had at the time eating their own raspberries straight from the bush. Even Mr J who adores raspberries fresh couldn’t eat enough to keep up with the flow, but he generally doesn’t like cooked raspberries, the one exception I found being a really fancy raspberry pie. Using a deep pie dish line with pastry, then pile in as many raspberries as possible, mounding them up and adding sugar to taste, cover with more pastry, make a hole in the centre of the pie large enough to take a funnel then egg wash and sprinkle granulated or demerara sugar on top, bake as usual then 10-15 minutes before the pie is cooked through remove from the oven and using a funnel pour in a custard -- egg whisked into milk or cream, return to the oven for the final 10-15 minutes. You end up with a glorious mixture of raspberries and custard and crisp pastry, quite delicious. The other thing I’d make was raspberry vinegar as it could be done with little effort and use up plenty of the glut.
I do like the sound of your tea!
I used to fill a 4 litre jar with raspberries, add ~500ml sugar, pour in a bottle of vodka, put on lid loosely, put in basement until Christmas. Strain out berries, bottle cordial.
Usually very nice.
chigau you have reminded me that I used to do a similar concoction with brandy, known for some odd reason in the UK by it’s French name, Creme de Frambois, delicious in a crisp white wine or on it’s own straight or diluted with some water to spread out the different flavours.
@Jazzlet, I probably would enjoy the raspberry pie too, although fruit pies generally make my blood sugar plummet and cause hypoglycaemia. I need to eat sugar with a lot of fat to avoid this. That is why my mother needs to add high-fat cottage cheese to all pies. If said pie is baked without cottage cheese, I must eat it with yoghurt or butter.
@chigau, if I were drinking alcohol, I’d be tempted to do that.
Today, we pressed approx 5 kg of juice out of about 7 kg of berries. It is a bit sour, so tomorrow we will add sugar and pectin and make lotsa of jam.
It’s not yet time for raspberries here, but I’ve just eaten the first bilberries and serviceberries, and before that lots of wild strawberries. The weather has turned relatively warm (too warm, I say), so everything is ripening fast. Bilberries are big this year, thanks to abundant moisture, and now the sunshine should give them some sweetness. I should soon start harvesting and freezing the bilberries, and look out for early mushrooms.
The question of delineating roaming rights is an interesting one, when it comes to agricultural meadows and recently abandoned crop fields. I think these are included in Finland, too (I could check to be sure, but it’s not relevant to my local environment). One problem could be that these may not be easy to distinguish from fallow fields, or fields that are actively cultivated with perennial feed crops. That is, not easy for visiting city people who are totally naive to local farming practices, or agriculture in general.
My neighborhood is an urban residential area to farming area interface, so it’s kind of a special case compared to most farming areas, in that there are lots of urban people using the outdoor areas around the crop fields for recreation. Another special case would be farming areas that are actually rural, but very popular with tourism. Though since Finland is more forest country than farming country, the public discussions on roaming rights tend to focus on forest resources and (the vicinity of) rural people’s yards.
In my neighborhood, the people tend to take shortcuts in certain places across the fields, especially those fields planted with perennial grass, trodding paths that destroy the crop (although the latitude of this destruction is marginal compared to the total field area). The local farm (university research farm) often plants signs in relevant locations on the field margins, to remind the public that walking on the fields is forbidden outside of the snow season. The signs are in Finnish and also English, because this area is somewhat international (not the least because of university students), and foreigners/immigrants are less likely to be familiar with the Finnish laws and customs. It’s unclear whether these reminders have any of their intended effect.
My personal criticism would be that the signs are worded as friendly reminders, from the viewpoint of someone (presumably a member of the farm staff) who’s very familiar with both farming and roaming. There’s a generall failure to explain in plain words to a naive reader why you shouldn’t walk on the field -- particularly a field that looks like a grass meadow, isn’t fenced off and doesn’t have livestock grazing on it. The English translation is also kind of clunky, and struggles to convey the Finnish convention that crop fields can be used for roaming in winter when the soil is frozen and covered with snow. I think this is a confusing and unnecessary thing to mention in this context, since in my observation nobody here wants to walk or ski on the fields during the snow season anyway.