A Summer of Earth Berries

You might have already seen via Facebook, that yesterday evening we went a-berry-pickin’.

The scheme involved cutting work early- Neumann’s Erntegarten (harvest garden) unfortunately closes at 6pm.

There was a bit were a few minutes of bike wrangling (I had to borrow one from a friend), and then some more minutes of people wrangling, during which I desperately tried to capture bumblebees with my camera.

The furry fliers are too fast!

And then, we mounted our trusty steeds, and were off into the not-even-nearly setting sun.

(This is Summer in Deutschland. Also, it was 4 pm)

The garden is just a short ride from our work, mostly flat. Probably just 10 minutes if you’re a good biker.

Only 20 even if you’re trying to organise a group of 6 and riding a bike with no gears or brakes.

Iman, our local ‘Golm Expert’, and organiser of this FruitPicking2015 expedition, lead the way.

When you’re in Golm, you can go in pretty much any direction and pass crop lands.

This time around, corn and wheat!

When you arrrive, you’re offered the option of huge plastic, or small wooden buckets, asked for a deposit, and sent off into the fields.

If you’re in for a huge haul, you want the buckets, but Pau and I went for the rustic kitsch of the holzkorbchen:

While the others mulled over the options, I made friends with a cat.

The fruit you can pick obviously depends heavily on the season, so you need to plan accordingly (Neumann’s has the information on the website).

We were in it for strawberries and cherries, but everyone agrees that we now have to go back when the raspberries are in full bloom.

In any case, Summer is the time!

Gruppenphoto!

The first harvest we hit up, was the blueberries.

See that one missing from the photo? Yeah, I ate it.

And it was delicious. As were all of its cousins.

Iman was kind enough to steal my camera and take some photos of me.

Here is me resisting the lack of some kind of photo apparatus, and using my terrible mobile phone camera to take more blueberry shots.

Right near the blueberries, were the sour cherry trees.

Beautiful, glistening, tart rubies, peeking though the leaves.

Or in some cases- just hanging against the sky- weighing down an exhausted looking bush, with not a single leaf in sight!

(Can you tell in this photo that I already have cherries in my mouth?)

If you’re visiting a garden for the first time, you should definitely ask the man (or woman) in charge where to pick the best berries. We filled our tummies, and several buckets, with sour cherries, but didn’t make it over to the sweet cherries, which were hiding on the other side of the road.

^cherry stained teeth!

The garden we visited also has pears, apples, plums, all the berries you can think of, and additionally sell juices, eggs, milk and cheese products, and cured meats.

Oh, and they sell beer!

The pears didn’t look ready yet (Aug-Sept says the calendar), so we headed over to strawberry land.

Picking strawberries (‘earth/ground berries’ in literal German), is more of a treasure hunt than picking blueberries and cherries. But a treasure hunt that is definitely worth the search!

When you finally taste strawberries from the field again, you really start to wonder how the big supermarkets can sell such a tasteless and mediocre products.

I mean, these things actually taste of strawberries!