Seeing red

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste. Goethe.

It seems that summer is finally here. Our spring has been so damp that almost all my rose bushes are covered in blackspot. That, and I've been to lazy to go out and spray them. At this point, it seems easier to just let them have their first flowering and then cut them back before I spray. This particular rose bush, Hot Cocoa, is my favourite this year because it is almost completely free of disease. It had aphids early on but I just gave it a hard spray of water with the hose and it has been fine ever since.

This photo (not mine) shows the colour more perfectly. It has a very unusual shading of midnight on the outside petals, its smell is divine, and the cut flowers last for days.
The perfect rose. 

I'm going to try to propagate some of my roses this year. It's a fairly simple process with a statistically reasonable success rate. Some of my grafted bushes are getting old and would be much better as rooted bushes. Did you know that rooted roses (also known as heirloom roses) can live to be 100 years old? I like the idea of my roses outlasting me.

My strawberries are performing abysmally and are just asking to be torn out, so I went picking with Bethany on Wednesday morning. Here are the kids, all raring to go.

Josh and Natalie ate many berries, evidenced by the state of their faces, hands, and clothes. Josh refused to let me photograph his red hands, for some reason. He looks armless.

Kenzie picked about 10 lbs of berries and Daniel was very helpful running buckets of berries around. I picked about 20 pounds and then went out gleaning this morning and picked another twenty. I think we're all set for strawberries this year.

Doubtless God could have made a better berry than the strawberry, but doubtless God never did.  William Allen Butler.

One batch of freezer jam.

I foresee a strawberry trifle in my near future.

My raspberries are in full gear. These kids cannot get enough of summer fruit. They love to go out to the veggie garden and eat them straight from the vines.

Oh yes.

Not a single cherry from the tree this year.

 It, too, is asking to go the way of the mimosa.