Where the wild raspberries grow

I donned a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, a hat, and heavy socks and shoes to pick the wild black raspberries that are growing beneath the collapsed apple tree in the front yard. There have never been any plants that have grown there in the past – although it wasn’t that long ago that I was mowing the grass there.

There's always been a few black raspberries around. My son, Zachary, always enjoyed grabbing a few succulent berries that grew by the mailbox. But amazingly, the plants under the apple tree have the potential for actually producing a harvest of fruit, and I contemplate whether I can organize their volunteer growth to make picking easier. I try to balance the lessons of leaving things to their own integrity and attempting to intervene and optimize the outcome.

I gathered almost a pint of the small berries and have a vision of fresh garden lettuce with a black raspberry vinaigrette dressing for dinner.

The garden is beginning to feed Stephen and I with harvests of Swiss chard, lettuce, beet greens, cilantro, green onions, parsley and basil. There are a couple of five-inch green hot peppers almost ready for picking and the pinky sized zucchini will be ready in a couple of days.

I watch the wild bees pollinate the tomatoes and I am aware that without their work, my own garden work would not be, quite literally, so fruitful. I wonder where their hive is and imagine it is filled with clover-tasting honey from the abundance of clover in the yard. I marvel at the beings of nature, which continue to function, just as we do, however burdened or stressed we become.

In this moment of time, we exist on a beautiful, interdependent planet that, without any human intervention, puts forth wild raspberries.