I have just gone through the garden, picking the raspberries and strawberries, added a few peaches from the  market and hemp hearts, greek yoghurt and made my daily smoothie. For years I have contemplated this, but it never seemed enough to carry me though to lunch, but with the greek yoghurt, which is very high in protein and the hemp hearts, I am totally full. 

We currently have 120 raspberry plants and about 50 strawberry plants. I only purchased one raspberry plant at the very beginning of last year. On one of hottest days of last summer a patient of mine brought over about 10 plants that she had just cleaned out from her bushes.  Then a neighbour threatening to get rid of all of his raspberries, invited me to help him out.

So early this spring I got a few of his. The thing I discovered was that many of these that we were given are ever bearing raspberries, (or fall bearing), they seem to produce some fruit in the spring and then a big crop in the fall. They are much bigger than the other raspberries.   So this summer in the heat of the summer, when it looked like we were going to get cooler weather (which we did not) I went and dug up another 20 or so of the neighbours raspberry bushes. I then spent weeks hovering over them trying to keep them alive with cloth covering, watering, watering, watering. AND was thrilled to see little buds coming out at the end of august.

So finally 2 weeks ago I went and got all of raspberries from his yard, bringing my plant total to 120.  Those ones do not look great but from experience I now know that they will survive, I will just have to wait until next summer to enjoy them.

My Oregon friends will think I am nuts, but we have also planted Blackberries, the thornless type.  Although there are some wild blackberries here, they are only in very select places.  We have found wild raspberries on the back on our property, in fact it was Chewy who first discovered them. He was eating berries, and sure enough they were raspberries. Since then I have found that there are many areas around here with wild raspberries. I unfortunately discovered this a little late for raspberry picking.  Most raspberries only produce in June, and the wild ones here clearly fit into that group.

So LOTS of berry smoothies next summer