Raspberry Season

This weekend a friend and I traded childcare so that we could do something with our husbands without the company of residents under four feet tall. Whenever Dr. Pediatrician and I have the opportunity to go on a “date” we are completely stumped as to what we should actually do. Go grocery shopping? Repair the crack in our driveway? Our favorite places to eat seem to be lunch restaurants only, so we don’t get that excited about going out to eat, plus it has been too hot and sticky to enjoy food lately.

So late at night on the eve of our date, I thought of going raspberry picking. Dr. P had never been to the most fantastic berry farm in central Wisconsin, Lakeview Berry Farm, and it would be much easier to pick a couple of gallons of raspberries with out the “help” of small hands and feet running all over the place.

It was a gorgeous evening after a hot and sticky day, and the raspberry farm is the most beautiful place! It overlooks a lake and there are acres and acres of raspberry rows plumb full of berries. You don’t even have to search to find the berries on the bushes. The berries practically jump off the bush and into your bucket. It is mind boggling how many raspberries there are. You can stay in the same 20 feet of the same row and go over it six times and still have no trouble finding berries. In no time flat we had picked 2 buckets of berries. My bucket had $1.50 fewer berries than my husband’s, but that’s because I ate those berries straight off the bush. There is NOTHING better than raspberries straight off the bush, warm from the sunshine. They tingle your tongue.

We drove back home (about 30 miles, which some might say is far to drive for two buckets of raspberries, but not only are the raspberries reasonably priced, but the whole picking experience is so calm and relaxing it is entertainment on its own). After retrieveing our children and zipping them off to bed, I drove to the nearest grocery store and bought a lot of jars and a lot of pectin and a lot of sugar and I made many, many batches of freezer jam. Yum.

Today we had raspberries for breakfast, raspberries for lunch and raspberries for snack. Mr. Cuddles isn’t supposed to have any, but he loves them, and he loves to sneak them.

Wouldn’t living on a raspberry farm be interesting? The thought of it makes me want to write a novel.