My two greatest pleasures this weekend were enjoying the thrashing of Maradona’s Argentina by Germany and enjoying the swelling of summer fruits with Lottie.
The former was divine retribution and the latter is divine consummation.
Cherry picking
Eat your heart out Suarez, but you will not be eating these sun blest fresh as the morning dew cherries. This year there are so many fruits that there are some for me, but I do keep a cool cat in my cherry tree.
Beware, commercial cherries may have residues of chemicals and should always be washed.
Cool cats for the birds
Keeping the birds at bay without fruit or football netting.
Pair of Pears
If you have the bottle, you can feed a bottle over one of the very small pears and its stem, support it from a higher branch and wait for the autumn. Then fill it with a pear eau de vie and sip it slowly until Christmas. Of course you should remove the bottle and the pear from the tree first.
Loganberries
Although I was tempted to continue my metaphor and suggest you blow a raspberry, rather than a vuvuzela, at Uruguay, these are loganberries a cross between raspberries and blackberries. They are easily confused with Tayberries that are usually thorny, have the same shape and parentage but are sometimes sweeter. These organic soft fruits have never been sprayed, but may have added protein!
Gooseberry
Look carefully at what is under the gooseberry bush, usually more gooseberries and occasionally some stalks. Possibly imperfect to the eye, but unpolluted to the taste. There is nothing like a gooseberry fool, other than a well whipped Uruguayan clot.
Redcurrants
The jewel in the crown must be these fruits, hanging like a string of pearls, translucent but radiantly ruling over all other bushes. If there is a hand of God it is here, when they are picked and sweetened for a summer pudding. There are no pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, or offsides here but fresh, honest fruits are the winners.
Salad days
Can any goal be better than to grow an organic plant like this?
The hand of a goddess, letting nature evolve.
But watch out for the many fungicides and pesticides used on commercial lettuces, some of which may be carcinogenic in high concentrations over time. It is wise, as a minimum, to wash non organic lettuce carefully before eating. Long term human toxicity data does not exist for many newer chemicals used in combination together.
The terminator is coming in the next blog; a must read for all those who do not have regimented allotments. No one can relax when the moving hand of the terminator writes his notice and having writ moves on.
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