I needed half a cup of raspberries for my cereal this morning so to the raspberry patch I headed. It is cool this morning, great weather for picking and in the quietness I once again remembered these berries are from Mom’s large patch of raspberries in Shorecrest. The bushes I have are actually from those bushes more than 50 years ago. I thought I heavily pruned last fall but I see now I left some of the old stocks. It is easy to see them now as they are dark and woody and their berries are smaller and earlier. It was not that obvious when I was pruning. Maybe half of my 3 cups of berries today are from old stocks. The new chutes are just beginning to fruit with much larger berries. I need Bob up here to help prune as he did it on Moms when we were young.
Then too, I remembered we would spend an hour or two picking raspberries when we were young and Mom would come down and go behind us and pick as many as we had picked commenting "look under the leaves". But then I wondered that maybe she had an advantage that way as she was a “little” bit shorter than us. I remember all the jam she made and then stored in the fruit room.
