Work, Grace, and Raspberries

Today is Labor Day and in honor of it, I decided not to labor in the blog vineyards. Resisting writing the daily blog turns out to be harder than I would think. Mostly, I find I write every day because if I don’t write today—any today that I’m in--then I definitely have to write tomorrow and I don’t have any ideas for tomorrow. Then, I find myself mulling over the possible ideas for today, and here it comes! So, here I was, this morning, having decided not to write, not work in the blog vineyards, indeed, not to work at all today; instead to read novels and eat bon-bons.

Nevertheless, 11 a.m. found me in the yard staring at the mass of 8-foot high raspberry canes, approximately half of which need to be cut down to the ground. The other half will need to be cut 1/3 or so of the way back at the end of October. If I wait too long to do this, I won’t be sure of which ones get cut to the ground and which ones go to waist-level. So, even though it’s Labor Day and I don’t have to work, I do it. This requires me to crawl around inside the raspberry bed (which is about 25 feet long and 10 feet wide) determining which canes fruited this summer, cutting them and then disentangling them from the soon-to-bear second crop.

Take it from me: If you are planning to grow raspberries, stick to the annual kind, not the biennial ones. Like the apple tree, these raspberries came with the house and I can easily imagine the original purchaser thinking, ‘How cool! Raspberries that bear one year in July and the next in October. Get two sets of them and you get two raspberry crops each year.’ Yes, it’s true you do, but the pruning drives me crazy and an October crop of raspberries is not likely to be very rewarding if the temperature rarely gets up to 60 degrees in the preceding month, which is very probable in late September and October.

But, raspberries are the queen of berries, the queen of fruit, in my book, so perhaps it is only appropriate that getting them to table is a chore of some dimension. Actually, they are pretty good about growing themselves. The deer sometimes come by and take a chomp out of the outside plants, but otherwise nothing much seems to be interested in eating them. Mine grow too close together for me to qualify as a good berry husbandry person, but they are also too close together for the birds to get into them, I think. Raspberries demonstrate that where there is hard work somewhere along the way, there are big rewards somewhere along the way. Ah! The kernel of the Puritan Ethic, the essence of Labor Day: in hard work there is grace and in grace there are raspberries, as well as a blog post. Well, something like that.