Growing and learning in the raspberry patch
A summer in the raspberry patch is a master class in patience and the importance of timing. Credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images/Loop Images
Another season of tending the berry patch winds down with another year's worth of lessons learned and reinforced.
A good gardener is always learning, always evaluating what works and what does not, hanging on to the former, letting go of the latter, forever making adjustments and trying to do better. Working a garden is like working life, in ways large and small.
That's true for any crop you grow, but it's especially true for raspberries, at least for amateurs like us for whom producing a luscious raspberry is a backyard grail.
The first thing you learn is that this is hard work. OK, perhaps not that hard in a physical sense, but it is exacting. You balance the nutrients in the soil and the exposure to the sun and the offerings of water because too much or too little of anything is not good. You prune and support when needed, and both of those will be needed, and you keep at it. Diligence is rewarded, sloth is not.
When you tend a raspberry patch, you learn to work in harmony with all sorts of creatures, like bees and wasps, often impressive numbers of bees and wasps, some with stingers to which one is quite allergic. But they are pollinators, so the raspberries need them as much as they need you. So when you move along the rows to pick the fruit, often reaching deep into the center of the stand, you learn to live and let live, to not react to what are at best slight provocations, to not flail wildly — and, as in one unfortunate incident, drop a nearly full quart container — when one yellow jacket accidentally settles for a moment on your hand. You learn to give your fellow creatures space and stillness and steady predictability, and everyone benefits.
Work a raspberry patch long enough and you begin to understand the personality of this fruit. Raspberries are impish. They love to hide behind leaves and other berries, such that you can look at a branch, up and down and directly at a branch, and not see all the berries it bears. You have to examine each branch from all sides and angles, lift it up or get down on your knees to look from underneath, move it from side to side and spread its leaves. And even then you might not have done enough to find all the berries that are ripe for picking. When you're making your way through a berry patch, you should always look back whence you came; the new perspective forces you to see things differently and leads to new discoveries.
As is true for any fruit or vegetable, a summer in the raspberry patch is a master class in patience and the importance of timing. Pick a berry too early and you miss its peak flavor and sweetness. Pick it too late and it collapses in a mushy heap between your fingers. Every berry has its optimal time and you want to meet it. But that optimal time varies, even for berries on the same branch, even for berries growing right next to each other, mere millimeters apart. No two berries are exactly alike.
The learning continues even after the season is over. When the crop is done and autumn turns to winter, you cut all the stalks down to the ground. And yet they come back in spring, thrusting up through the ground, starting another brilliant journey, and the season resumes. When you tend them properly, raspberries are resilient.
I wish every one of our leaders had a raspberry patch, to help them care better for the garden that is our country.
*Note to readers: If you want to write to me, be sure to use the new email that appears at the top of the column. Thank you.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
