Thoughts occasioned by the picking of fruit

Along with the wild strawberries, the cherries on my działka are now ripe for picking. I must point out that these are czereśnie (Prunus avium) rather than wiśnie (Prunus cerasus - sour cherry), Up into the tree I go for the first time this year. Last June, during Ladder Week at Lidl, I bought a super aluminium ladder (made in Germany) for around 260 złotys (around £50), which extends my reach into my fruit trees considerably, but is still nowhere near high enough for me to get into the tops of my two cherry trees. And so, I have to reconcile myself to the fact that any fruit more than 3.5m off the ground will be either eaten by the starlings, or will rot and fall. So - cherry picking is restricted to low-hanging fruit, to use two well-worn business metaphors. 

Below: a half-kilo punnet (left over from tomatoes bought at Biedronka) filled with cherries. This lot took around 20 minutes to fill; filling the punnet with a similar amount of wild strawberrys took an hour and 40 minutes.

Unlike the wild strawberries, which will all go into nalewki, the cherries are to be eaten and enjoyed on the day. Sour cherries (wiśnie) go to make wiśniówka; they are too sour to eat raw, and need the addition of sugar to be palatable in any form. Czereśnie contain 50% more sugar naturally, so don't need a boost. Not being into cakes or pies, I'll eat my cherries off the tree, after washing.

Fragaria vesca, wild strawberries - poziomki - are something very special. They are tiny, weighing around 2g. (Commercially grown strawberries weigh around 15g.) They are fragrant - and fragile. To pick them, you need to get down. Down and dirty. Down among the buglife. Fragaria vesca shares the ground with Urtica dioica (stinging nettle) and Ixodes ricinus (tick). At the micro-level, the earth smells different - I am reminded of my first Polish scout-cub camps in Gloucestershire in the mid-1960s. Fingers have to coordinate with eyes to nip between the foliage to extract the fruit.

While picking, I listen to the birdsong. It is staggeringly good. Such wonderful voices, trilling, chirping, tweeting, calling to one another in short bursts, or longer fragments that evidently contain some kind of syntactical structure. What one species of bird makes of the song of another species is beyond me - but evidently there's consciousness at play here, and some elementary form of understanding. And indeed, joy and gratitude.

Importantly, my fruit is not sprayed with insecticide or herbicide. Some will have gone off because of infestation from fly or fungus, but there's still many, many more that are untouched and perfect.

The strawberries were less evident last year, but grew profusely in 2019; two-year cycles seem common. So I'm not expecting a bumper crop next year. I do hope, however, that the five or six wild-strawberry patches will expand naturally. They make for the ideal ground cover.

I look forward to another week or two of cherries and wild strawberries before their season ends. Sour cherries will be coming soon - more business for Poland's spirytus rektyfikowany distilleries! Having paid 54zł for the last two bottles of Spirytus Lubelski, I can see prices are soaring - before the pandemic, a half-litre cost 42zł at Lidl. Useful stuff. Antiseptic, hand-wash, gargle for sore throat (diluted 2:1), spirytus is magical stuff, so I can see why the prices have risen!

This time last year:

First half of 2020 - health in numbers

[Will cover this topic soon.]

This time two years ago:
First half of 2019 - health in numbers

This time three years ago:
Key Performance Indicators - health - first half 2018

This time four years ago:
Three and half years of health and fitness data

This time five years ago:
First half of 2016 health & fitness in numbers

This time six years ago:
Venus, Jupiter - auspices

This time seven years ago:
Down the line from York

This time eight years ago:
Cider - at last available in Poland

This time nine years ago:
Despondency on Puławska

This time ten years ago:
Stalking the stork

This time 12 years ago:
Late June lightning