I am overrun with golden raspberries and can’t pick them fast enough. A great problem to have, I know! They are one of the most prolific plants in my garden – and so easy! I’ve grown the Fall Gold variety in Pennsylvania and now in Denver and they seem pretty happy in both places.
This variety is considered ever-bearing, but it actually gets two distinct crops each year. The fruit we are eating now is growing on the canes (branches) that grew and produced fruit last fall. Once this summer crop is complete, the canes dry up and will be cut back. At the same time there are new green canes growing that will produce fruit this fall and again in the spring.
Raspberries, are of course, one of the new super foods, recognized as being anti inflammatory, immune boosting, and full of antioxidants. (1) And the berries are delicious. I think the golden varieties are even sweeter and tastier than the reds.
So you can see there is a lot to love about golden raspberries, But there is more.
They are one of the best grazing garden foods. That means they are easy to pick and pop into your mouth as you are wandering through or past the garden. The golden raspberry canes are also tidy as raspberries go. If you are not familiar with traditional red raspberry plants, they are the brambles and thickets of fairy tales. Canes can be eight feet tall or more and if not tended can become an unwieldy, tangled, thorny mess. (Think about the brambles that surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s castle.) The Fall Gold variety grows 4-5 feet at most, and the canes are scratchy, but not full of thorns.
But here is my favorite thing. They seem to be invisible to birds and other pests. I have never had any problems with birds or wild life eating the berries. (I did have a very spirited German Shepard, Magic, who loved the golden raspberries and would graze on them, but I think he observed me eating them first.)
It’s intriguing that just the change in color, something the birds are not on the lookout for, is enough to camouflage the berries. And this brings me to the mindfulness focus for the week – invisibility.
What are the seemingly invisible things in our own lives? What is it that we don’t see or don’t tune into even though it is right in front of us? And are there ways we ourselves practice invisibility? How might we be cloaking ourselves from the rest of the world? The idea isn’t to change anything, but to bring our awareness to the concept of invisibility and how it presents itself in our lives.
The focus word this week is invisibility – inspired by golden raspberries. For more information about weekly mindfulness focus words click here.
(1)Top Ten Benefits of Raspberries
More Information on Fall Gold Raspberry
