I’ve been meaning to do a garden post and decided to start with the part of the garden that most excites us right now- the berries. We’ve been enjoying raspberries, currants, and strawberries in the garden for awhile now. Can you believe how delicious the first berries taste after a long winter of only fresh fruit from the grocery store? (I’m grateful to have access to fresh fruit in the winter, to be sure, but the flavor definitely doesn’t compare.) We freeze and preserve berries for the winter, and I do adore a bowl of frozen berries, but there’s nothing quite like a fresh berry at the peak of ripeness! The red and black currants have mostly finished up now, and the raspberries are winding down (they’ll come back for another round of berries in the fall), but the strawberries are still going.

We’ve also been enjoying berries not from the garden, but from the surrounding forests. Our family was going on a daily walk and this time of year is such a fun time for our walks together because there are wild berries to pick along the way. There’s something magical about picking wild berries in the woods and we’re grateful to have so many of them growing here. This year especially has been the best year for the wild berries that we have ever seen. We’ve been picking thimbleberries, salmonberries, red huckleberries, and some wild blackberries are starting to ripen too. Bracken loves his time outside so much he would live out there if we let him, but I’ll tell you- nothing gets a kid begging to spend more time outdoors in the summertime quite like picking berries!