Well, it is saskatoon season here at Cultivation Peace.  I was hoping they would be ripe for the picking when my niece was here a week ago.  They were beginning to ripen then and we did pick enough for a pie, but they are in full berry now!  Last year they were ready to pick in the first week of July, this year, I think because we have had limited rain and a late summer they didn’t have enough sun or water to bloom that soon.

When I bought the house, the previous owner told me there were saskatoon bushes around the house.  It took me 3 years to check it out.  I had an aversion to forging for food, I am not sure where that comes from in the specific sense, but for some reason I have a fear about it.  I ended up saskatoon picking with some friends of mine on their property and since then I have been harvesting my own.  From what I understand, the more you pick a bush the more berries it produces the following year.  Well, this year, after 4 years of picking I had to take a break before I got through 1 patch, there are so many berries!

I still have a bag of frozen berries from last year, so I have to figure out what to do with all of these lovely purple berries so they don’t go to waste.  I am going to try a few recipes.  I’ve been having a hard time finding a special drink that is delicious, but not full of sugar and other crazy ingredients, so I’ve decided to try to make some savory ‘syrups’ for lack of a better word.  I am going to try a recipe that I will post if it turns out that reduces the berries with a coconut palm sugar for a bit of sweet as a base and then try adding other flavors such as lemon, or mint, or something like that.  I heard about some homemade reduction type mixes for non-alcoholic drinks so I’m trying a few things out.  I am also going to try a granola of sorts and to add some to a protein ball recipe and see how it goes.  I might also dehydrate some and see how they fair as ‘raisins’.

So, I spent around 2 hours picking from my hammock to the road (not a very large space, but full of bushes).  My fingers are purple and my body was getting sore.  I have to wear rubber boots and long pants because every time I don’t, I end up with some sort of poison ivy or oak from being in the bush back there.  I got some again behind my right knee from when I picked with my niecey.  Rubber boots aren’t the most supportive . . . I really should get some good insoles for them 🙂 The bushes were beautiful and dripping with ripe purple berries, many of the bushes are quite tall back there, fighting for the sun I imagine, but they are so flexible I can just pull them down to get to the tip top berries.

I absolutely love the nature of this place.  I am currently listening to 4 baby barn swallows chirp away waiting to be fed.  The parents built a nest above my door last year and I decided to see how it went.  It was so neat watching them, and then they had babies and watching that whole process was so cool.  The down side was once the babies hatched the adults pooped all over my deck and in front of my door in particular, so I decided I would not let them nest there again this year.  I fought with them for 3 weeks, knocking down their nest repeatedly, but they just kept rebuilding.  I finally got worried that they would not have a nest ready for their babies so I gave in and let them build.  I am not sure exactly why I attracted this experience, is it because I have some emotion to work out about always meeting other’s needs first? or that I have some emotion around sharing and being taken advantage of? or something else entirely?  I’m not really working that one, but it is playing around in the back of my mind.

I also just saw a hummingbird chasing another smaller bird, that’s the first time I’ve seen that.  I usually have flowers out that the hummers can eat, but this year they did not bloom and I am not doing a lot of planting, so I have not seen as many of those awesome little birds as I like to.

Now, I have 4 liters of saskatoons and I’m leaving them on the deck to let the critters crawl out of them, then I’ll wash them and start to process them in some way, with leaving a bowl out for snacking of course.  They are a weird little berry, not very sweet with a seedy texture, but the darker they are the sweeter they are and handfuls are so delicious!

I’ll be going out again tomorrow or later today to finish that section and see where else they are growing.  I saw a whole bunch out my window just in the forest that I’ll have to check out.