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| Raspberries! |
Last week some friends and I drove to Sauvie Island, Oregon (technically part of Portland) to pick berries. There are many, many farms there and most of them offer a "u-pick" option where you can pick you own produce and pay a low rate per pound. The place I planned on going actually turned out to be closed (on a Sunday, which is very unusual here) but there were plenty of other farms to choose from, so we headed back down the road to the other nice one we saw.
I am simply mad about raspberries, though they tend to be expensive if you buy them at the store. They (and all the fruits) were only two dollars a pound at the u-pick place, so I really stocked up. We started with boysenberries before moving on to blueberries and finally raspberries. We planned on picking blackberries, too, but after several hours in the sun we were getting tired and more than a little sunburned, so we decided to call it quits and visit again for those.
From a Witchcraft perspective, the Pacific Northwest is a literal buffet of goodness. The kinds of herbs, trees, and magic plants that most of the rest of the US can only read about grow here in abundance. The magical Hazel tree, for example, who's wood is almost impossible to find in middle American here grows like a weed; I can think of a dozen such trees in a few blocks around my house.
We had a great time picking berries, but I came home with a pretty bad sunburn (yes, we have sun here in the Pacific Northwest) and learned not to rely on cloud cover and "Oh, we'll only be out here for an house" thinking instead of sunscreen! Many of the berries I ate raw, but the rest I carefully cleaned and put in the freezer. Some of the blueberries, too, we cooked into delicious blueberry muffins which, I'm (almost) ashamed to say, didn't last long!
I do love summer, but I am ready for autumn already........
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| The bridge to Sauvie Island |
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| Fields |
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| Magical Rowan Tree |
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| Rowan berries |
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| My berries |
