Summer Berry Harvest
View from a Chef, Writer, Foodie, and Farmer.
You-pick, the signs says. An ingenious way to harvest one’s fruits of labour. The sun is hotter than any of us will admit, the leaves curling inwards, edges crisping like my skin as it slowly turns to pink. If I am as red as the berries at the You-Pick farm, does that mean I am ripe as well? Maybe a bit beyond that, standing up the air in my lungs does not suffice, and I am nearly one with the strawberry plants. Squatting on my haunches, the scent of mom’s jam rises from the berries that rot on the stem.
So many missed, their hiding places under wide chlorophyllic umbrella leaves so efficient, the plants must reproduce, and life will persist. The seeds will sink into the earth just as human bones will do one day, we all fertilize the ground eventually. Kneeling in the dirt, peering under the low canopy of strawberry plants, the flashes of bright red and the hues of deep bruising red, the waft of their sweetness is heady. Closing one’s eyes the smell of the degreened berries is hyperbolic, the jam jar walls too high to climb.
The field downhill is past the hop vines, the trellis reaching far, the heat spreading a scent of musk and the hope of future inebriations. Stepping slowly over the straw yellow grass, the sound of wind in the trees and the towering hop trellis is soothing, a breath of paradise, raspberries on the breeze, the redness face level, a kiss from the bushes, spiked with armour.
Someone has picked here already, the cones of berries long gone, white and fresh and nude, embarrassed to show their lingerie, the whiteness of the hidden berry core, surrounded by clusters of tiny hard green berries, little bumpy rocks of sage coloured hope, next week the sun will have forced these lime green jujubees to explode into their purest form, the chlorophyll decaying to reveal the rich glowing red anthocyanins, a word too ugly to mean berry-red but here we are. The ugly beauty of life once again. Rotten fruit hangs beside the perfectly ripe ones, mirroring the cycle of life on one spindly stem, the weight of existence too heavy to bear, leaning into my hands and offering its wares. Gladly gathering the sweetness, more memories gleaned from the bushes than actual fruit, the satiation is sufficient to keep the sadness at bay. Sunlight sideways on the swollen drupelets, those singular ruby gems, glowing like they know the answer to life.
