Raspberries and Red Fox (and Baby Dog)

New summer flowers are beginning to bloom around me. The spring ones are gone, and summer’s blooms are just getting going. Today’s photo is a purple blooming raspberry (also known as purple flowering raspberry and thimbleberry). The flowers are very showy, aren’t they? Showier than the fruit will be, actually. I think the maple-shaped leaves are very pretty, too. The plant is actually a member of the rose family (rubus odorous). The fruits aren’t usually eaten as they are extremely seedy, though they have a nice flavor with a bit of a tang. The berries won’t be ripe until the end of August or so.

My morning started off with a bang, well, actually a bark. Baby Dog has seen the fox again, and in nearly the same spot as she did last year. We had just finished walking through the woods and were heading out onto one of the slopes, when we both saw the fox at the same time. It was perhaps 50 yards away, sitting out in the open at the edge of the slope. We watched it bark. Then it barked again. Baby Dog returned fire and barked back at it. The fox barked again, still sitting there looking very doglike. Baby Dog, whose voice, by the way, is considerably more impressive than the fox’s, barked back at the fox.

At this point the fox decided it was time to head out, so it turned tail and headed back up the slope. Baby Dog tried to follow---at least until she reached the end of the lead. One thing I’m sure of is that now I’ll never be able to get her to walk past this spot without stopping to look for the fox. She’s been stopping here nearly every morning for the past year since her last fox sighting.

No, I don’t have photos of our fox encounter. Sorry. I learned early on that a dog in one hand and a camera in the other do not make a good combination.

Jackpot!

Last night I picked the first of this season’s black raspberries, which are possibly my favorite berry. I didn’t get a lot in this first picking, just a heaping half-cup or so. This year’s crop will be an improvement over last year when I barely got enough for a few servings. It’s not, however, going to be large enough for me to freeze any, I’m afraid.

It will likely be the weekend before the next batch is ripe enough to pick. The good news about this season’s crop is that the berries currently appear to have a wide variation in their level of ripeness. I saw everything from black to red to just barely pink to hardly formed. I’m hoping that means I will get to enjoy them over a wider length of time than is typical.

Dog enjoys them too, but since they are my favorite berry, I don’t let him have many. One time two or three years ago I was picking berries with Dog in tow. He saw me pick one and pop it into my mouth. He immediately did the same thing, pulling a berry off a lower stem with his teeth, leaving the leaves and stem intact. I was floored. Who would ever think that even a very smart dog like Dog would immediately decide that my picking and eating a berry would result in his attempt to do the same thing the first time he saw it? And do it so carefully without damaging the rest of the plant? And in the third place, who would ever think that a dog would like black raspberries? Another reason I keep him from picking raspberries is that he makes little differentiation between ripe and unripe berries. He may be smart but his palate isn’t well developed.