Les Fraises et les Framboises

Strawberries are prettiest, but raspberries are the very best of berries. That's because they taste the best when they're still warm from the sun and fall into your hand with the tiniest amount of pressure on the vine. You end up with purple gravy on the tips of your fingers and where the fingers connect with your palm, and on your tongue.

Raspberries are also very easy to grow, because they spread by runners. You dig up any raspberry sprout, make sure it has a few roots on it, and thunk it into any earth, good or bad, hard or soft. In a few months the berry vine is three feet high and a few months after that you're eating purple beauties from plants growing over your head.

Strawberries, on the other hand, are cantankerous. They insist on soil that is loose and warm. You've got to water them well and if any ripen the birds like them when they're just one or two days less ripe than the way you like to eat them.

(This reminds Plotnik of the cornfields in Pennsylvania, when he and Duck lived on the farm there. In the late summer, families of raccoons would come through the corn fields just before sunrise, tearing into the almost-ripened ears of corn, peeling back the tassels and eating exactly one bite out of each one, probably the tastiest bite. Then, they'd move onto the next plant in the row and take a bite out of that one too. Corn with a bite out of it couldn't be sold. An efficient family of raccoons could ruin an entire patch of corn for just that one bite. Talk about gourmets.)

(As for the farmers, they hated raccoons far more than if grizzly bears had rampaged the fields and destroyed the entire crop. Looking at their corn with one bite taken out drove them crazy.)

Back to berries. Birds like raspberries too, but raspberries are more numerous and they grow on tall plants. Their fruit tends to hide under leaves where the birds can't find them. Strawberries are shrimpy plants and their fruit grows up on top of the leaves or trails on the dirt. A blind magpie couldn't miss a ripe strawberry.

Plotnik grows strawberries every year but almost never gets more than a few tasty, but tiny, wizened up spitbacks. So imagine his delight when he walked out to his strawberry box yesterday, turned over a few leaves out of habit, and found two enormous Quinalt strawberries, hidden under the leaves and in back of the box where birds couldn't see them, squirrels obviously couldn't climb up to, pillbugs couldn't build a nasty nest underneath and none of the neighbor cats could pee on.




"Ha, two berries!" you scoff. Don't. While Plot was thinking about when he should pick them and what he could do with them, Duck said: "Is this for me?" and popped the biggest one in her mouth. Plot ate the other. DANG they were good. There are more ripening up as we speak. This global warming is just not hurting the Saint Plotniko Garden.




The next posting comes from Saint Plotniko. Mummy P is by herself this weekend since Brother Shmeckl is in Alaska and The Great PD is heading to The Big Shmapple once again. So Plot and Duck will take Mummy P to a museum or two, and play with Toddler La Belly and feed The Great FiveHead sushi and be home on Monday.