Seeing Red

This is the time of year when I go nuts for the invasive-but-delicious Asian raspberries known as wineberries. As I tend to note this time of year, I tend to gorge myself on the berries that practically overrun one of my jobsites. This week, the berries are at their peak of ripeness:

I'm seeing red, and it's delicious. Hey, suddenly I am reminded of one of my favorite tunes by antipodean rockers Split Enz:





That slightly off-kilter piano solo in the bridge never fails to crack me up... or is it that I'm practically drunk on wineberries?

The Annual Ritual

She's an unlikely "twin", because she's slender to the point of reediness and has a glorious flow of lustrous dark hair to a point halfway down her back, but we share the same birthday (though she's fifteen years younger than I am). We used to work together, and we got along famously, even though we had a jokey rivalry over the wineberries on a jobsite, leading to our "raspberry summit", when we used the driveway and parking lot of the site as a line of demarcation- she getting the berries south of the drive, and I getting those north of the drive (for the record, my parting gift to her was a big jar of homemade jam).

Anyway, the first thing this morning, I received the traditional text message from my twin, and she taunted me by telling me that she knows where the gaps in the fence around the property are. Joke's on her... I decided that the best way to keep people from crawling through the gaps was to train the berry briars across the gaps, as a sort of "biological warfare"- of a purely defensive nature, of course. All kidding aside, I told her I'm planning on grabbing so many mulberries this year that I will have a big bucket of mixed berries with her name on it. We were only fruit rivals in our ongoing comedy routine... I learned long ago that bitter fruit rivalries only lead to a fruitless end. Besides, it's her birthday.

Postscript: Mom also called, and I received text messages from several friends. While I am working tonight, so things will be low-key, I went out for beer and trivia with a bunch of old friends last night, and am planning on going out for a gin-and-tonic or two with friends tomorrow evening. It's a funny week, two friends of mine celebrated their birthdays yesterday and one of my uncles celebrates his on the 20th. It's a busy week, a happy week.

Ouchy Bounty

Today is the last day of our major summer fundraiser, but I lucked out, and got to work another site today. Sheesh, yesterday, with it's "pushing triple digits" heat, was enough of an ordeal.

The site that I worked today has plenty of wineberry brambles, so as soon as everyone else left, and I locked up, I went to work, gathering as many ripe aggregations of drupelets (hey, I'm a pedant!) as I could. It was ouchy, ouchy work with all those spiny brambles, but it's worth it, even though I wasn't making fifty dollars an hour doing it. Tomorrow, I'll be making jam with friends again.

Many of the brambles still bear their fuzzy unripe fruits, so I imagine I'll be able to gorge myself on wineberries for at least another week. It's a pretty damn good fringe benefit!

Another Day of Slacking Blog-Wise

I spent much of today picking wineberries when I should have been researching a post about Romney's offensive speech to the NAACP (Rumproast is seriously on the case, though). I figure that, since I've been a slacker, I'd try to get away with simply posting a link to a wonderful documentary about New Zealand's Flying Nun Records which was brought to my attention by all-around good guy Another Kiwi. The linked page is part one of a six-part retrospective. If you've ever wondered about the pop music scene in New Zealand over the last three decades, you're in for a treat. I was reminded of this documentary when A.K posted the video for the... uh... heavenly Heavenly Pop Hit by The Chills.

Of course, New Zealand is still putting out some fantastic music these days... my particular favorite recent-ish antipodean song has got to be Happy as Can Be by Cut Off Your Hands, which came out a few years ago:





Sorry about the perfunctory posts lately, but the berry season is perishingly short, so I've been preoccupied with my usufructary endeavors.

Thoroughly Nettled...

Aunt Snow's latest post shows a picture of a lovely dinner that her son cooked. The last thing I cooked was a big pot full of delicious, nutritious stinging nettles. Every spring, I subsist largely on nettles- they grow profusely on a couple of my jobsites, so they are free and plentiful. Even better, they are packed with protein, and historically were a crucial post-winter food, bridging the lean period between the end of winter the the appearance of late spring's bounty.

To be entirely candid, I merely parboiled the nettles to neutralize the "sting" of their urticating formic acid-filled hairs. Now that they are parcooked, I will treat them in the same way I treat spinach. I can now use them to make nettle pesto, nettle soup, creamed nettles, nettle fritters, nettle pie, nettle omelets... thankfully, unlike this guy, I actually like the basic component of my spring diet. The nettles are good until their flowers develop, which in these parts typically occurs in late June- after that, phytoliths in the leaves can harm the kidneys. Given their ubiquity on-site, they'll be a major component of my meals for the next month and a half.

I am always happy to see the nettles appear on the property, though I believe I am the only one who feels this way- the wineberries receive a much warmer reception.