Picking your own fruits

cupcakechef

cupcakechef

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When I was a kid, I was lucky to live not too far from a berry picking farm. It was lovely to go there and pick fresh berries (and sneak quite a few into our mouths - don't worry, that was 100% allowed!)

Right now I'm not living somewhere that has direct fruit picking nearby which is a bit of a bummer.

Do you pick any of your own fruit?
 
I'm keeping a very nervous eye on some wild raspberry bushes near to where I live. Nervous because they seemed to be getting strangled by some bindweed-type plant last year. We've also got billions of blackberries in the area, but it will be a few months before they are ready. It always makes me laugh/cringe when I see small punnets of blackberries being sold for exorbitant amounts in shops. For the sake of half an hour and the odd scratch, you can pick masses of them.
 
Well it is mango season here, and we have been getting mangoes by the ton. We have a mango tree, but we do not have to pick the mangoes, they just fall when they have reached the right stage of ripeness. The tree has grown very big and needs to be cut back. We give away a great many of our mangoes, but lately we have been looking into the possibility of selling them, since they are enough to help supplement our income.

Mangoes happen to be one of my favourite fruits. Some people here make what we call mango chutney. It is a kind of spread similar to jam, which can be used on bread, or it can even be used as a topping on your food. Mango juice is also popular around here.

We would pick limes from our lime tree, however.. There are also 2 sugar apple trees, but the birds tend to get at most of the sugar apples before we do. These usually have to be picked, otherwise I notice that some of them just stay on the tree and rot.
 
Duck59 said:
It always makes me laugh/cringe when I see small punnets of blackberries being sold for exorbitant amounts in shops
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I know. It is amazing what people will pay for them isn't it. But I do know of people who will only eat things from supermarkets. Anything else, they won't touch because they are so afraid of the 'wild' countryside. They have no knowledge of it sadly. If it has not come from a plastic tub/supermarket then it is not edible!
Last year I collected (picked is the wrong word here) over 50kg of sweet chestnuts and I don't mean tiny ones. We have around 10 or so trees across 2 locations that produce seriously large sweet chestnuts. Now a bag of unshelled sweet chestnuts normally retails at £2.99 for 250g...
I think I shall have a sweet chestnut chocolate torte for dessert this weekend... :hungry:
 
We've picked and finished the early strawberries ,white currants are ready ,we await the raspberry glut with the black currants and Tay berries and red currants ,and then to the end of the summer the late strawberries,yesterday we picked and prepped 9k of gooseberries,wild raspberries and wild strawberries have started to ripen
Latter on we will do the hedge rows with blackberries ,sloes and even rose hips
 
I pick my own fruit. Literally. I have blackberries bushes, raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants. And gooseberries. I used to have to fight the my duck and chickens to pick them before that lot managed to eat everything.
 
Caribbean girl said:
Well it is mango season here, and we have been getting mangoes by the ton. We have a mango tree, but we do not have to pick the mangoes, they just fall when they have reached the right stage of ripeness.
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Pure envy. Fancy that, mangoes everywhere...not much chance of that In Scotland, though having said that, I've got some friends in London that have an olive tree in their garden.
 
I used to go apple and blueberry picking back home. There are some places here, but nothing very close, so I haven't done it in a while. I do pick citrus fruits off some trees by one of the trails where I walk though, (public trees), and also pick and eat the wild raspberries and blackberries that grow on the trails. A neighbor shares his bounty sometimes. He has a grapefruit tree, but I can't eat many of those, because they're so acidic.
 
I loved going blackberry picking with my mum as a child! What confuses me though, is that we called the October half term 'blackberry week' but as an adult I've noticed that they're ready to pick well before and usually dying off before then. I don't know if it's because I now live a little further south or what? Only by 200 miles, wouldn't have thought it would make that much difference. Now, I haven't picked wild ones for a good few years. I did with my step kids when we lived in the village but we moved.

I think a lot of people buy them instead of picking them because they don't know whether they've been sprayed with chemicals, yet we don't know everything that goes into supermarket fruit but plenty of people still buy that and some don't even wash it.
 
There is quite a differential for blackberries in the UK. I was down in Oxfordshire last year in July and there were lots of ripe berries. Where I live, in Fife, it was a good couple of months before we had any.
 
We are advised to eat fruits while they are fresh, and getting freshly picked fruits is what I like most. I do plant watermelons in my garden besides having several orange trees. I like eating oranges while they are fresh and juicy.
 
Within a two hour radius of where I live, there are heaps of farms which allow you to go and pick your own fruits, such as strawberries, blueberries, apples, peaches, etc.. They charge by the kilo and often require you to pick a minimum amount, but they're still way cheaper than the supermarkets. I have a feijoa tree and a red guava tree in my garden, and we always plant tomatoes in the summer.

Fruit that you pick always tastes better! It's because fruits that get sent to the supermarket are often picked when they're unripe, so their flavours and textures can never be as good as truly ripe fruit.
 
fantastic food said:
Within a two hour radius of where I live, there are heaps of farms which allow you to go and pick your own fruits, such as strawberries, blueberries, apples, peaches, etc.. They charge by the kilo and often require you to pick a minimum amount, but they're still way cheaper than the supermarkets. I have a feijoa tree and a red guava tree in my garden, and we always plant tomatoes in the summer.

Fruit that you pick always tastes better! It's because fruits that get sent to the supermarket are often picked when they're unripe, so their flavours and textures can never be as good as truly ripe fruit.
Click to expand...

I'd never heard of Feijoa so I had to look it up. Are you living somewhere exotic? (Top tip: you can add your location to appear below your avatar/picture. Go to the Lounge and follow @SatNavSaysStraightOn 's directions). Its always interesting and informative to know where people are when they talk about local foods.
 
I've just discovered a wild apple tree a mere short hobble from my (temporary) home. The apples are just getting ripe and I managed to pluck a few this morning. Not bad - small, but crisp and juicy.

There is also a cherry tree, but some thieving git has clearly been along with a, well, cherry-picker.

Hawthorn is also in full fruit and gangs of blackbirds are zooming into trees from all angles.
 
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