Royal Golden Raspberries

Being outside is awesome! Don't get me wrong. Being inside is awesome too. Awesome with a capital W.... for wicked awesome! Seriously, who can complain about shelter? Not me. But there really are great things about the outside.

Like raspberries.

And not just any raspberries either. Golden Raspberries. And not just any Golden Raspberries either. Homemade ones! That's right. The last time I wrote about our raspberry bush, it was a youngun, a sapling, a juvenile little snot-nosed shit disturber.

Back then, I didn't really like the home-grown golden raspberries it produced. I couldn't quite place my finger on it, but there was something odd about them. Oh, how things have changed.

This year our golden raspberry crop was huge, mature and awesome! The sweetness of the berries oozed with deliciousness. They were amazing. I didn't really want to try them at first, and was happy enough eating the tasty red raspberries for a while. But I just couldn't let the golden ones go to waste, caved in and ate them.

Every day I ate a handful. A super tasty number one awesome handful. I was almost alarmed at how mouthwatering they were. I'm talking fit for a king. I was stunned. I had no idea I was a king. But the handfuls of gold mother nature handed me every day was a major clue.

The second and final clue came after I ate 50 of the royal raspberries, then sat on my throne for an hour. Long live the king!

Weird Fall Harvest

With mutant fruit and nightmarish spiders building human-sized webs in my backyard, even my garden knows something creepy is in the air. Yes, Halloween is coming.

Even now our raspberry bush is producing mass quantities of the delicious fruit that is its namesake. The red berries are delicious. The red berries are juicy. But that's not all.

When I first saw these white raspberries growing on our raspberry bush in late July I thought they simply weren't ripe yet. Then I noticed something. The pee-coloured berries were falling off, landing in the snot-coloured grass, and turning to mushy ectoplasmic goo.

So, of course I decided to eat a few of the white raspberries. They were very sweet, but had a much different flavour than the red berries hanging on the branch beside them. I couldn't say for sure that I liked them yet, there was nothing really 'wrong' with them.

Curious, I checked Google & Yahoo to see if I could find any information on the mutant berries. To my surprise, I couldn't. All I could find was more people asking more questions about what they are, and what they're worth. Finally, I stumbled across this link, informing my uninformed brain that they're actually called Golden Raspberries and indeed, they are rare. Delving deeper into the mystery of the pee-coloured berries, I found this site: Supermarketguru.

It seems people like the uriney berries. And that means, to be fair to the poor berries, I'll have to give them one more chance to delight my tastebuds before the frost kills them all.

There's a moral to this story: It just goes to show you shouldn't judge anything by its colour. Except crayons. Yeah. You pretty much get what you ask for with crayons.

And yellow doesn't necessarily mean yucky. Except pee.

Summer Berries

When I was a kid, my neighbour had two long rows of raspberry bushes growing in her backyard. I had an open invitation to wander over and pick as many as I could, because she could not possibly eat them all.

Even though I had an endless supply of raspberries, my favourites were always blueberries, which is why Boo Berry was always my favourite monster cereal.

Oh, the things you can do with blueberries! Pie, in a bowl, and uh, that’s all I can think of.

So last year my friend gave me a raspberry bush which I planted in our backyard. And every day our awesome little bush yields between 4 and 7 super-awesome, ripeified berries.

We bought a little tub of blueberries for the everyday low price of $1.88 and I sprinkled my home-grown raspberries on top and had myself a super-delicious fruit bowl.

It feels good eating something from our own garden. Sadly, my list of awesome things to do with raspberries is even shorter than my blueberry list. Stinkin’ useless raspberries.

Perhaps I should submit a question to the Useless Men on what to do with raspberries.