The Fruit Bat has landed

Mimosa and ET nicknamed Elena, 'fruit bat,' as an infant - when Mimosa was forced to ration fruit to the little gobbler after she ate herself sick on half a cantilope at age 9 months.

Today, we hit fruit pay dirt. On a whim, I had found a local 'pick-your-own' farm, right down the road from our house. So this morning we loaded up the family and headed off in search of the mythical raspberries, grapes, and blackberries. Well, boy was that a good decision. The raspberries and blackberries are just coming on - we got more blackberries because the raspberries had been pretty picked over, and we sampled some 4 different varieties of grapes, filling up a gallon basket to bring home. We learned that there is picking until the first frost in September and bushes were filled with green berries, waiting to ripen.

Elena with her haul.


Elena stayed true to her fruit loving roots and had to be cut off from grape consumption at lunch.

Tonight we ate fresh black and raspberries sprinkled over some Homestead Creamery (local place) icecream. Oh man, we each had nearly a pint of berries on a little dab of icecream. It was amazing - the other title of the blog entry could be 'gluttony.' Elena comes by her love of fruit the honest way (through me and mostly her Gram). We want believe that there will be fresh blackberries and raspberries for another solid month...In fact, we really don't believe it and have made plans to go to the Tuesday 7am picking hours (just one of us by ourselves - picking with Elena is fun, but not very efficient). We want more berries to eat and freeze and to save to make jam once our kitchen arrives. What if it isn't true and all the berries are gone? The blackberries from the farm taste amazing. As a kid, my brother Seth and I spent a chunk of most summers in Oregon. We usually arrived in raspberry season - I can remember Grammy have a few fresh picked raspberries in a bowl waiting for us. In Texas, the raspberries were sad and flavorless (as were the blackberries) and the real Oregon ones tasted amazing. I remember dishes of them and cobbers filled with them from Grandma Twerp's garden. I associate raspberries and strawberries with those summers. In face, I have a vivid memory of driving out to a farm with my great-grandma Butch to pick up flats of raspberries and strawberries to make jam - I remember this not for the berries but because Grandma Butch explained to me how you knew when to pass other cars by the solid or dashed yellow line down the middle of the road. I was amazing and a little ashamed that it had never occurred to me to notice something so obvious. But we were usually on our way back to Texas just as blackberry season started - too late in the summer. If we were lucky there might be a few ripe ones on the bush behind the shed. In Santa Cruz, Jake and I used to pick blackberries beside the road out to Ben Lomond- but they were always a little small and not quite as sweet as you would hope (and very, very dusty). But these blackberries today were amazing - they burst in your mouth like summer itself. Warm and sweet. So the prize for best blackberries goes to blacksburg. Oregon holds the raspberry spot. And nothing can beat the organic strawberry field at two small farms in Santa Cruz.