Black Currants!

Good friends of mine live out in Hope and have a berry patch they let me pick. It’s that time of year finally, so I took a little drive out there this last weekend.

The patch is medium sized and quite overgrown with horsetail and other weeds. It also has a lot of raspberries (two different kinds) in it – but since we have our own here at the house, I did not pick any of them. I just concentrated on the good stuff: Black Currants!

It takes a while to identify the black currant plant out of all that jumble of green – but once you learn to see it, the picking gets easier. Normally I would get down underneath the plants to look up under the leaves, but this patch is so overgrown I could not do that. Instead, I would find the plant and then lift it up to get at the underside.

This year, the black currants were so huge and plentiful – I don’t think I’d ever seen it like that before! In just half an hour of picking, I got probably 12 cups worth. We’ll probably end up making cordial out of them this year.