Several years ago I walked out to the edge of our 2 1/2 acres of land to where some wild rosebushes grew along the fenceline near an acequia (water ditch). I was a little envious that we didn't have these thick bushes with their spare pink flowers in spring and red rosehips in autumn. They grew in profusion on our neighbors' land and I noticed that some shoots had drifted over to ours. I dug up a couple of small volunteers, replanted them behind the adobe wall close to the house and hoped they would grow. Silly me. They are wild. They grow anywhere. Their roots will reach down to hell if there's any water there. They form thickets, take over, and are now most formidable six foot high nasty thorny bushes that we somehow didn't get around to trimming. Until this morning after a nice civilized walk in the park with Spike.
I wrestled thick branches, thorns, biting ants, stinging mosquitoes, emerged bloody, scratched, and itchy. So now there is a huge pile of thorn-filled branches waiting to be loaded into the truck and driven to the landfill tomorrow. I've always known, since we started to clear land for a garden (ha!) 20 years ago, that when something manages to grow around here at 7500 feet it grows for eternity. I've been pulling up the same weeds with their thick stems and strong tenacious roots since 1990. However (silly me), I still like the way these wild bushes look when covered with hundreds of small flowers sending out a woodsy-sweet fragrance so I rescued some thin young green stems and shoved them in a bucket of water. If they root, I'll plant them outside the wall, far away from the house.
At the end of that rosebush summer we planted what we thought was a dwarf apricot tree. As I wrote here in late April, every year except last when I made 12 jars of jam, the blossoms froze and we never saw fruit. This year as usual the blossoms froze again, but today as I cleared out the overgrown rosebushes that were choking the now huge tree, I spotted five plump apricots, still greeny-yellow in the lowest branches of the tree where they were obviously sheltered from the freeze that took all the rest of the blossoms. Five apricots!
It's probably unnatural to admit this, but I'm going to. I hate blueberries! After buying two pounds at the supermarket, discovering they were basically tasteless, making muffins that looked deformed and a pie full of sugar but still tasteless, I realized that even though I consider myself a pretty fair baker, I have never had success baking anything blueberry related. Organic? Frozen? Wild? I've never experienced blueberry satisfaction the way raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, and even wild huckleberries (picked in CT woods) provide. So I'm finished with blueberries forever.
Except as a color for yarn
Or maybe the clafoutis I planned to bake with leftover berries
Or that lucious blueberry tart in the
My French Kitchen cookbook by Joanne Harris
Later on I'll drive into town to Monet's Kitchen and buy a tart pan
After I meet my friend for lunch...
No comments:
Post a Comment