The Poor, Ripe Berry and the Bad Ass Vulture

The Celtics deserved to win. Now, let's talk about berries.
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Twining up the fences and winding through the bougainvillea and Burmese honeysuckle in the rear acreage of The Great Plotnik World Headquarters, are three different kinds of bramble berry vines: blackberry, boysenberry and purple raspberry.

Blackberries and boysenberries are independent flora. They grow where they like. What you have to do is root out and burn the blackberry but keep and enjoy the boysenberry. The reason: thorns. Blackberry thorns are vicious, long, razor sharp and hard to avoid since the thorns grow even on a vine no more than two inches out of the ground. A vigorous blackberry vine can cut you worse than a cactus.

Boysenberry vines, on the other hand, are thornless, and the fruit, a bit purpler and with less seedy flesh, tastes even better than a blackberry. Plus, it looks beautiful among the bougainvillea bracts.




The Bababerry purple raspberries are the best, though. Nothing tastes as good in a bowl of cereal as a fresh raspberry. Plus, they're everbearing, so after the large crop right now (bushels and bushels and bushels...maybe four bowls of granola with six berries each), they'll produce again in the fall. Also, you can dig up the raspberry suckers and plant them wherever you like and the next year: more raspberries.



Strawberries are technically berries too.



We say 'technically' because, for Plotnik, a berry should be wild and easy to grow. A boysenberry is a perfect berry. A strawberry, on the other hand, is capricious and demands care. The plants don't spring up naturally, you have to want to work with them. If you want to get fruit they must be pruned and fertilized and pampered.



The bramble fruits don't care if you love them or not. All they need is sun. Strawberries are like the Lakers. They may surprise you with delicious victories, but it's more likely that they'll fold in the end. A bird may eat them. A large bird. A vulture. A vulture may devour the poor, defenseless, offenseless, stagnant but still ripe berry. Next year, the vulture will return, oi.