Oh Rebecca, what a gloriously nostalgic trip to Wimbledon!
I too remember the rare treat of the telly on, my mother's vivid disapproval of "that McEnroe" (always "that," never "John!") and preference for glossy Jimmy Connors and ice cool Borg! Wimbledon and late night passes for the Horse of the Year Show!
I'm chuffed to learn we can now pick our own blueberries, as, like you, I have very much taken to them in the years since those sickly muffins first made an appearance, and really enjoy them in salty porridge.
Your painting is delightful! Imagine being able to paint a fruit, with itself! Try that with a banana!
Although, you *could* draw a lemon in its own secret ink, and iron it into being, while watching the tennis.
Oooooh, I’m going to try the invisible ink idea using lemon juice, Jackie - that’s brilliant! Thank you!
I remember getting confused as to which player was which when I once watched a tennis match with Granny. ‘Hooray……booooooo!’ I had to correct myself. She was horrified. ‘NO cheers for McEnroe, thank you very much!’
Love the sound of your mother's kitchen - brings back memories.
I have blueberries every day - they tell me they're one of nature's superfoods and so I indulge withe porridge, sometimes with yoghurt for lunch and the other day I set some in lemon jelly as I was feeling under the weather and the tartness was just the thing.
I could no more have left the blueberries to melt, dye, be creative (superfood, told you!). Your self control is admirable. I'd probably have scoffed the lot!
Hmmmm, regarding ‘self-control’ - in an earlier draft of this post I’d included a picture of my black lips and tongue to show that not every blueberry I’d set out to paint had survived the project! 🤣
Blueberries in lemon jelly sounds like a delicious combination. So sorry to hear that you were feeling under the weather - hope you’re much better now.
I’m having a long-overdue catch-up here on Substack - I’m looking forward to reading your latest! xxx
I love this. The memories you bought back of the black & white tv with the circular aerial. You didn't have to fight of what to watch. There was virtually no choice. The story of the blueberry was fascinating and I loved your drawings. I love the idea of paintings crafted out of blobs or mistakes. Strawberry 🍓 blueberry 🫐 clotted cream and yoghurt sounds wonderul xxxx
Gosh yes, the days of no choice of what to watch on telly - forty years ago was sooooo very different to now (hmmm, now I’ve said that out loud I’m horrified that the summer in question was that long ago)!
Our black-and-white telly had a big dial on the right-hand side that you had to turn to get one of the three (at the time) channels. I seem to remember that ITV was as far anticlockwise as the dial would go, whereas the two BBC channels were in the other direction.
I’ll never forget the day we came home from school and found that we now had a colour telly! WITH A REMOTE CONTROL, to boot!
The contents of that bowl were absolutely delicious - enough for eight generous portions. Oh, and I may have licked the spoon, but don’t tell anyone…..
"untidy polka dots" is the PERFECT description of blueberries' pattern in a muffin! I smiled through this entire post, as Jim and I and our whole neighborhood of kids would pick blueberries during Michigan Augusts at Maxxon's Blueberry Farm (sadly no longer in business) for a week, learning the tricks of picking the bushes clean, eating lunch under the huge maple trees. Your blueberry art is fantastic!!! I love your experiments and their results. Hooray for British blueberries, too! How neat that you picked at Trehane. The nickname "bluebs" is new to me. I'm going to add it to my British-inspired lexicon. 🔵. Thanks for the nod, too, toward my blueberries, and I would like a movie about your mom's kitchen and the fruit stand, please. ❤️
Guess what? This morning I found that a recently-purchased egg was cracked (just the shell, not the membrane, so totally safe), and wondered what I should do with it. I rummaged in the freezer thinking I might have some frozen raspberries hiding from last time I’d made a cake….. but no, I found some more bluebs! Supermarket ones this time, not PYO - anyway, I made a batch of muffins using the cracked egg! My Jim will make short work of those….
Thank you so much for telling your story of all you kids picking the blueberries at Maxxon’s - what happy memories! I’ve said it before, but I think it’s wonderful that you and your Jim had grown up together. ❤️
Mmmmmm. . . . blueberry muffins! I love them warm, and when I used to eat butter, I used to slather a warm bluey muffin with butter and let it melt. By the way, when I was a baby, my nickname was Bluey, because my eyes were so blue. And it's really neato that my Jim and I have such a long shared history. ❤️
Blueberries are grown near our rural property, but I’ve never picked or purchased them (not really fond of them.) We do have vast amounts of wild blackberry on our property though and got quite a few picked and frozen the last time I was there. I have great memories of picking them as a child, standing among the brambles with an old coffee can strung on a string around my neck and using a long pole with a nail at the end to pull a thorny branch toward me while plucking berries with my other hand.
There’s a lake near our other home and we’d swim across with a tub inside an old inner tube, and pick blackberries while standing waist high in the water with the carp gently nibbling at our toes. We’d swim back pushing the full tub of berries in front of us. Those berries were the very best, growing with their roots right down in the edge of the lake, they stayed much juicier than berries growing in dry soil.
Oh wow, you picked blackberries when you were IN the lake - that’s amazing, Kerry!
I love the flavour of blackberries but I don’t like all the pips which get stuck in my teeth - ugh! Blackberry and apple crumble is a much-loved British autumn pudding - the flavour combination is superb, especially when it’s served with plenty of custard!
Like you, blueberries aren’t my favourite fruit - when I first tasted that blueberry muffin I had been expecting a really intense dark berry flavour, similar to a blackcurrant, and I was surprised that they didn’t really taste of very much. Still, I’m happy to eat them - just not in the volumes that I can wolf down strawberries, put it that way!
Creative and culinary -- what a lovely partnership! I've gone to u-pick farms for strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, and while I love them all, I'm a huge fan of blueberries. I love how easy they are to both harvest and eat. I love their silver-powdery color. I love the flavor of a fat, sweet berry. I've never endeavored to paint them, or with them, but it's fun to live vicariously through you.
For what it's worth, I've never visited an American u-pick operation that made any attempt to curb the snacking. I think they realize it's just the cost of doing business and build it into their pricing. Good thing, because I'd never be able to follow that rule!
Thanks, Elizabeth! Oooooh, you call it u-pick over there - that’s a great name for it! I’ve always known it as pick-your-own.
That silvery bloom on a blueberry is just amazing, isn’t it? And I love how they’ve got that little indented dot where the stalk had been, and that beautiful star-shaped calyx.
I’m sure that when I was a kid we used to eat a few strawberries when I was picking them - it’s human nature, after all! I’m not sure we’d have got away with sampling the blueberries the other week, though - it’s very hard to hide a black tongue and teeth when you’re smiling broadly at the weigh-in staff! 🤣
U-Pick and Pick-Your-Own are interchangeable here. :) And, the star-shaped calyx is swoon-worthy. I stand by my 'no rules against eating from the field' here in the U.S. We miss the mark on a lot of stuff these days, but I think we get that one right. Come here in August. You can flaunt that black tongue and teeth!!
LOL! The sign in the field rather put me off - I’d’ve felt so guilty! - but maybe next time I might taste a couple. I mean, how else would I know which variety to pick?! 😉🫐😁
I feel so privileged to have blueberries all year long. Ya gotta love living nextdoor to countries that grow delicious foods. Your experiments with using fruit and their juices really cracks me up. I love the blueberries better than the strawberries. So much more expressive as they melt away in the sunlight.
Blueberries all year long? Wow, Sue, that’s amazing!
It’s funny - I didn’t really set out to make blueberry art, but I knew I wanted to write about our trip to the PYO farm, and before I knew it I had another juicy art project on my hands! I suspect I’ll be moving away from the fruit bowl in my September post - I haven’t decided on the theme for that one yet! 🤣
Year-round veggies and fruit are a product of our friend to the south, Mexico ... or other countries. Availabilities of such yummies depends on where in the US you live and what culture you are. I dare say folks in the Southeast have different fruits and veggies that we do here in the West. And California has a kalaidascopic plethora of organic food all the time displayed in country fair splendor. The Great Basin desert ... not so much.
Anyway, September may bring colored leaves and other interesting herbs to add to your art. Go for broke! Or should I say, "Tally-ho!"
It’s lovely finding delicious produce. Our local farm shop has had a sign out for the last week or so - ‘Local Victoria plums’ - so that’s really nice! Quite a lot of supermarket veg is imported - well, the out-of-season stuff - I baulk at buying asparagus (or strawberries, or green beans, or whatever) from the other side of the world, but gorge on it whenever it’s at its peak.
If only avocados grew in our climate! Tried planting an avocado stone a few weeks ago but with little hope of success. It might turn into a houseplant eventually, but I’m not expecting any fruit from it! 🤣
I went to Venezuela once, and brought an avocado home in my suitcase. It was about the size of a melon - I’d never seen anything like it!
WOW, that's quite some avocado. Also, sometimes they grow for you in a glass of water or sometimes not. I've gotten some lovely but short-lived celeries just by putting the end of the stalk in water. As soon as I plant it in soil, though, it dies. IDK! Good luck with yours.
I’ve tried growing two avocado stones recently - the one I had over water (in an egg cup) went mouldy, and I wasn’t too impressed with how the one I’d put onto compost in a pot inside a poly bag in a warm, dark place was doing - ie it was doing nothing - BUT - FANFARE - on closer inspection, just before I was going to put it onto the compost heap, I noticed a white rootlet!!! It’s been reprieved, and I’m so excited that it’s growing.
Haven’t tried the celery trick! I love celery - I might have a go. 😎
I hope you have better luck with the celery. I can usually get a pretty good little sprig going. Some have reached six or so inches. But then, they die. Maybe putting them out in our intense Nevada sunlight did the dirty deed.
Wow, Rebecca, what an amazing berry adventure! The blueberries on canvas, especially that star-shaped calyx, and the blueberries painted with their own juice 🤣 are really so lovely and inspiring. And thank you for sharing my own wild blueberry musings - truly, it seems, the delights of blueberries are limitless! 💙
Ooooh yes! Great idea! I’ve eaten it a couple of times - it’s absolutely beautiful sliced, but I don’t recall it tasting of very much. Thanks so much for the link!
I’ve often wondered what I might do with star anise - the spice - actually. Something 3D, perhaps - pressing it into clay, maybe.
I love these essays about your fruit + art! Lovely stories, enchanting artwork, and your process tales. Mmmm, perhaps also because I love berries of all kinds but blueberries the most. I have yogurt and blueberries almost every morning (from frozen in the non-fresh season).
It was really interesting to see the various forms of imprinting the berries took. (I had written staining but that implies something we don't like). I love that you can weave so thoughtfully your stories of picking berries to eat with your efforts to USE the berries for art. Brilliant. What fruit is next? Figs? Pomegranate? Can't wait to hear!
Thanks, Sabrina! I hadn't set out to do what has turned out to be a mini series of fruit-related arty posts - I think my write-up of my visit to the PYO farm coincided with the time that I was wondering what to talk about in my next Art & Treasures 🖼️ post, and it just kind of happened! 🤣
You're right - it is a stain, really, isn't it? I guess a stain is a spillage of dye in the wrong place - rather like a weed is a flower in the wrong place!
Figs: sore point. We've got a lovely fig tree, but we had the tree surgeons in last autumn, and one of the subjects of their attention was the fig. It was planned, but let's just say that every third August we don't get figs, and this August was one of them! 🤣 They're beautiful shapes and colours for arting, though. Maybe next year!
I love when those serendipity events happen! And lucky us!
So sorry to hear about your fig tree mishap! I think they do have more and less productive harvests, so perhaps you can think of the this as your own 'new' fig rhythm? One of the houses we lived in longest when I was growing up had both a fig and a pomegranate tree and I was scared of both fruits and wouldn't eat them. Fast forward to adulthood and I ADORE both fruits and am appalled at my childhood aversion. I even planted a fig tree in my first purchased house with my husband at the time and by the time it was big enough to fruit, we moved. 🤷♀️ Life. I've wondered if I could grow one here, and you give me hope!
Ooooh, I’m sure a fig tree would thrive where you are, Sabrina! And yes re ‘new fig rhythm’ - last time we’d had the tree pruned its next harvest was extraordinary prolific. Already looking forward to next August!
Awww, thanks, Julie! I had fun with this one - and I’m sure there’s still a purple tinge to my fingers!
I hear you re catching up! In your fabulous Write Along yesterday I was doing some catching up of my own - cataloguing a couple of weeks’ worth of notes so that I know I’ll be able to find them in the future. Found several ideas I’d forgotten I’d had, so that was a great result! Thank you so much for the session - I really enjoyed it. 😊
I’m now catching up on my notifications, and am looking forward to a really super read of my inbox, which has been mounting up. I don’t know where my days go, really I don’t! 🤣
I love your blueberry art as much as I do your strawberry art, which is saying a lot. And your memories of your mother's kitchen, glorious-- lowers my shoulder blades by at least an inch. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Sue! It seems I’ve started a habit of making art from fruit - it’s funny how things turn out!
There was always exciting stuff going on in Mum’s kitchen - and there still is, which is wonderful! There’s a cucumber glut in their garden (and therefore also their kitchen) at the moment - hmmmm, now there’s an idea…….
Painting with blueberries! Yes, a thing I should try - as my hands are stained from them as we speak. I prefer low bush blueberries, and have been blessed to live in a part of the world where they’re plentiful - and even have an uncle who has an acre of low bush blueberries. A childhood chore was to go pick them. We thought we were so clever, eating blueberries in the field when we were denied snacks.
I can soooo relate to ‘eating blueberries in the field when we were denied snacks’! My guilty secret was picking peapods off the plants and shelling the peas straight into my mouth.
A family member once took himself off to the greenhouse and ate every single tomato from the plants! He wouldn’t go near a tomato for years afterwards, and didn’t start eating them again until well into adulthood.
(We always had plenty to eat: but gosh, those garden temptations were sometimes just too much to bear!)
Oh Rebecca, what a gloriously nostalgic trip to Wimbledon!
I too remember the rare treat of the telly on, my mother's vivid disapproval of "that McEnroe" (always "that," never "John!") and preference for glossy Jimmy Connors and ice cool Borg! Wimbledon and late night passes for the Horse of the Year Show!
I'm chuffed to learn we can now pick our own blueberries, as, like you, I have very much taken to them in the years since those sickly muffins first made an appearance, and really enjoy them in salty porridge.
Your painting is delightful! Imagine being able to paint a fruit, with itself! Try that with a banana!
Although, you *could* draw a lemon in its own secret ink, and iron it into being, while watching the tennis.
Oooooh, I’m going to try the invisible ink idea using lemon juice, Jackie - that’s brilliant! Thank you!
I remember getting confused as to which player was which when I once watched a tennis match with Granny. ‘Hooray……booooooo!’ I had to correct myself. She was horrified. ‘NO cheers for McEnroe, thank you very much!’
Yum.
Love the sound of your mother's kitchen - brings back memories.
I have blueberries every day - they tell me they're one of nature's superfoods and so I indulge withe porridge, sometimes with yoghurt for lunch and the other day I set some in lemon jelly as I was feeling under the weather and the tartness was just the thing.
I could no more have left the blueberries to melt, dye, be creative (superfood, told you!). Your self control is admirable. I'd probably have scoffed the lot!
Hmmmm, regarding ‘self-control’ - in an earlier draft of this post I’d included a picture of my black lips and tongue to show that not every blueberry I’d set out to paint had survived the project! 🤣
Blueberries in lemon jelly sounds like a delicious combination. So sorry to hear that you were feeling under the weather - hope you’re much better now.
I’m having a long-overdue catch-up here on Substack - I’m looking forward to reading your latest! xxx
Going to the farmers market to buy blueberries today! 🫐
Hurrah!!! Hope they're delicious, Jillian!
I love this. The memories you bought back of the black & white tv with the circular aerial. You didn't have to fight of what to watch. There was virtually no choice. The story of the blueberry was fascinating and I loved your drawings. I love the idea of paintings crafted out of blobs or mistakes. Strawberry 🍓 blueberry 🫐 clotted cream and yoghurt sounds wonderul xxxx
Gosh yes, the days of no choice of what to watch on telly - forty years ago was sooooo very different to now (hmmm, now I’ve said that out loud I’m horrified that the summer in question was that long ago)!
Our black-and-white telly had a big dial on the right-hand side that you had to turn to get one of the three (at the time) channels. I seem to remember that ITV was as far anticlockwise as the dial would go, whereas the two BBC channels were in the other direction.
I’ll never forget the day we came home from school and found that we now had a colour telly! WITH A REMOTE CONTROL, to boot!
The contents of that bowl were absolutely delicious - enough for eight generous portions. Oh, and I may have licked the spoon, but don’t tell anyone…..
"untidy polka dots" is the PERFECT description of blueberries' pattern in a muffin! I smiled through this entire post, as Jim and I and our whole neighborhood of kids would pick blueberries during Michigan Augusts at Maxxon's Blueberry Farm (sadly no longer in business) for a week, learning the tricks of picking the bushes clean, eating lunch under the huge maple trees. Your blueberry art is fantastic!!! I love your experiments and their results. Hooray for British blueberries, too! How neat that you picked at Trehane. The nickname "bluebs" is new to me. I'm going to add it to my British-inspired lexicon. 🔵. Thanks for the nod, too, toward my blueberries, and I would like a movie about your mom's kitchen and the fruit stand, please. ❤️
Bluebs are an excellent complement to strawbs!
Guess what? This morning I found that a recently-purchased egg was cracked (just the shell, not the membrane, so totally safe), and wondered what I should do with it. I rummaged in the freezer thinking I might have some frozen raspberries hiding from last time I’d made a cake….. but no, I found some more bluebs! Supermarket ones this time, not PYO - anyway, I made a batch of muffins using the cracked egg! My Jim will make short work of those….
Thank you so much for telling your story of all you kids picking the blueberries at Maxxon’s - what happy memories! I’ve said it before, but I think it’s wonderful that you and your Jim had grown up together. ❤️
Mmmmmm. . . . blueberry muffins! I love them warm, and when I used to eat butter, I used to slather a warm bluey muffin with butter and let it melt. By the way, when I was a baby, my nickname was Bluey, because my eyes were so blue. And it's really neato that my Jim and I have such a long shared history. ❤️
Awwwww, ‘Bluey’ is such a lovely nickname for a blue-eyed baby!
Blueberries are grown near our rural property, but I’ve never picked or purchased them (not really fond of them.) We do have vast amounts of wild blackberry on our property though and got quite a few picked and frozen the last time I was there. I have great memories of picking them as a child, standing among the brambles with an old coffee can strung on a string around my neck and using a long pole with a nail at the end to pull a thorny branch toward me while plucking berries with my other hand.
There’s a lake near our other home and we’d swim across with a tub inside an old inner tube, and pick blackberries while standing waist high in the water with the carp gently nibbling at our toes. We’d swim back pushing the full tub of berries in front of us. Those berries were the very best, growing with their roots right down in the edge of the lake, they stayed much juicier than berries growing in dry soil.
Oh wow, you picked blackberries when you were IN the lake - that’s amazing, Kerry!
I love the flavour of blackberries but I don’t like all the pips which get stuck in my teeth - ugh! Blackberry and apple crumble is a much-loved British autumn pudding - the flavour combination is superb, especially when it’s served with plenty of custard!
Like you, blueberries aren’t my favourite fruit - when I first tasted that blueberry muffin I had been expecting a really intense dark berry flavour, similar to a blackcurrant, and I was surprised that they didn’t really taste of very much. Still, I’m happy to eat them - just not in the volumes that I can wolf down strawberries, put it that way!
Creative and culinary -- what a lovely partnership! I've gone to u-pick farms for strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, and while I love them all, I'm a huge fan of blueberries. I love how easy they are to both harvest and eat. I love their silver-powdery color. I love the flavor of a fat, sweet berry. I've never endeavored to paint them, or with them, but it's fun to live vicariously through you.
For what it's worth, I've never visited an American u-pick operation that made any attempt to curb the snacking. I think they realize it's just the cost of doing business and build it into their pricing. Good thing, because I'd never be able to follow that rule!
Thanks, Elizabeth! Oooooh, you call it u-pick over there - that’s a great name for it! I’ve always known it as pick-your-own.
That silvery bloom on a blueberry is just amazing, isn’t it? And I love how they’ve got that little indented dot where the stalk had been, and that beautiful star-shaped calyx.
I’m sure that when I was a kid we used to eat a few strawberries when I was picking them - it’s human nature, after all! I’m not sure we’d have got away with sampling the blueberries the other week, though - it’s very hard to hide a black tongue and teeth when you’re smiling broadly at the weigh-in staff! 🤣
U-Pick and Pick-Your-Own are interchangeable here. :) And, the star-shaped calyx is swoon-worthy. I stand by my 'no rules against eating from the field' here in the U.S. We miss the mark on a lot of stuff these days, but I think we get that one right. Come here in August. You can flaunt that black tongue and teeth!!
LOL! The sign in the field rather put me off - I’d’ve felt so guilty! - but maybe next time I might taste a couple. I mean, how else would I know which variety to pick?! 😉🫐😁
What a yummy, tasty, pretty post. Appeals to several of the senses. 🤗🍓🫐
Thanks so much, Beth! I’m sure that my fingers are still slightly purple…. 🤣
I feel so privileged to have blueberries all year long. Ya gotta love living nextdoor to countries that grow delicious foods. Your experiments with using fruit and their juices really cracks me up. I love the blueberries better than the strawberries. So much more expressive as they melt away in the sunlight.
Blueberries all year long? Wow, Sue, that’s amazing!
It’s funny - I didn’t really set out to make blueberry art, but I knew I wanted to write about our trip to the PYO farm, and before I knew it I had another juicy art project on my hands! I suspect I’ll be moving away from the fruit bowl in my September post - I haven’t decided on the theme for that one yet! 🤣
Year-round veggies and fruit are a product of our friend to the south, Mexico ... or other countries. Availabilities of such yummies depends on where in the US you live and what culture you are. I dare say folks in the Southeast have different fruits and veggies that we do here in the West. And California has a kalaidascopic plethora of organic food all the time displayed in country fair splendor. The Great Basin desert ... not so much.
Anyway, September may bring colored leaves and other interesting herbs to add to your art. Go for broke! Or should I say, "Tally-ho!"
Tally ho indeed!
It’s lovely finding delicious produce. Our local farm shop has had a sign out for the last week or so - ‘Local Victoria plums’ - so that’s really nice! Quite a lot of supermarket veg is imported - well, the out-of-season stuff - I baulk at buying asparagus (or strawberries, or green beans, or whatever) from the other side of the world, but gorge on it whenever it’s at its peak.
If only avocados grew in our climate! Tried planting an avocado stone a few weeks ago but with little hope of success. It might turn into a houseplant eventually, but I’m not expecting any fruit from it! 🤣
I went to Venezuela once, and brought an avocado home in my suitcase. It was about the size of a melon - I’d never seen anything like it!
WOW, that's quite some avocado. Also, sometimes they grow for you in a glass of water or sometimes not. I've gotten some lovely but short-lived celeries just by putting the end of the stalk in water. As soon as I plant it in soil, though, it dies. IDK! Good luck with yours.
It was delicious as well as enormous!
I’ve tried growing two avocado stones recently - the one I had over water (in an egg cup) went mouldy, and I wasn’t too impressed with how the one I’d put onto compost in a pot inside a poly bag in a warm, dark place was doing - ie it was doing nothing - BUT - FANFARE - on closer inspection, just before I was going to put it onto the compost heap, I noticed a white rootlet!!! It’s been reprieved, and I’m so excited that it’s growing.
Haven’t tried the celery trick! I love celery - I might have a go. 😎
I hope you have better luck with the celery. I can usually get a pretty good little sprig going. Some have reached six or so inches. But then, they die. Maybe putting them out in our intense Nevada sunlight did the dirty deed.
Wow, Rebecca, what an amazing berry adventure! The blueberries on canvas, especially that star-shaped calyx, and the blueberries painted with their own juice 🤣 are really so lovely and inspiring. And thank you for sharing my own wild blueberry musings - truly, it seems, the delights of blueberries are limitless! 💙
Awww, thanks, Sydney! 🫐😊
And we all thought fruit was just for eating!!! 😆
Naaaaaah, you can make SOOOOO much mess with it, too!!!! 😉😂 Such fun!
Do you have starfruit across there? I think they might make for interesting printed patterns, too. https://www.thespruceeats.com/prepare-star-fruit-and-nutrition-information-3217091
Ooooh yes! Great idea! I’ve eaten it a couple of times - it’s absolutely beautiful sliced, but I don’t recall it tasting of very much. Thanks so much for the link!
I’ve often wondered what I might do with star anise - the spice - actually. Something 3D, perhaps - pressing it into clay, maybe.
Can’t wait to see THAT!
I love these essays about your fruit + art! Lovely stories, enchanting artwork, and your process tales. Mmmm, perhaps also because I love berries of all kinds but blueberries the most. I have yogurt and blueberries almost every morning (from frozen in the non-fresh season).
It was really interesting to see the various forms of imprinting the berries took. (I had written staining but that implies something we don't like). I love that you can weave so thoughtfully your stories of picking berries to eat with your efforts to USE the berries for art. Brilliant. What fruit is next? Figs? Pomegranate? Can't wait to hear!
Thanks, Sabrina! I hadn't set out to do what has turned out to be a mini series of fruit-related arty posts - I think my write-up of my visit to the PYO farm coincided with the time that I was wondering what to talk about in my next Art & Treasures 🖼️ post, and it just kind of happened! 🤣
You're right - it is a stain, really, isn't it? I guess a stain is a spillage of dye in the wrong place - rather like a weed is a flower in the wrong place!
Figs: sore point. We've got a lovely fig tree, but we had the tree surgeons in last autumn, and one of the subjects of their attention was the fig. It was planned, but let's just say that every third August we don't get figs, and this August was one of them! 🤣 They're beautiful shapes and colours for arting, though. Maybe next year!
I love when those serendipity events happen! And lucky us!
So sorry to hear about your fig tree mishap! I think they do have more and less productive harvests, so perhaps you can think of the this as your own 'new' fig rhythm? One of the houses we lived in longest when I was growing up had both a fig and a pomegranate tree and I was scared of both fruits and wouldn't eat them. Fast forward to adulthood and I ADORE both fruits and am appalled at my childhood aversion. I even planted a fig tree in my first purchased house with my husband at the time and by the time it was big enough to fruit, we moved. 🤷♀️ Life. I've wondered if I could grow one here, and you give me hope!
Ooooh, I’m sure a fig tree would thrive where you are, Sabrina! And yes re ‘new fig rhythm’ - last time we’d had the tree pruned its next harvest was extraordinary prolific. Already looking forward to next August!
Maybe I'll have to coincide a trip to Glyndebourne with your over-productive fig harvest! 🤣🤣🤣❤️
😄
Rebecca!! You are so clever and a great storyteller. I love the blueberry art. :) Delicious and beautiful.
(btw...I'm reading this as we write together...ssh...catching up) So happy to see you today!
Awww, thanks, Julie! I had fun with this one - and I’m sure there’s still a purple tinge to my fingers!
I hear you re catching up! In your fabulous Write Along yesterday I was doing some catching up of my own - cataloguing a couple of weeks’ worth of notes so that I know I’ll be able to find them in the future. Found several ideas I’d forgotten I’d had, so that was a great result! Thank you so much for the session - I really enjoyed it. 😊
I’m now catching up on my notifications, and am looking forward to a really super read of my inbox, which has been mounting up. I don’t know where my days go, really I don’t! 🤣
I love your blueberry art as much as I do your strawberry art, which is saying a lot. And your memories of your mother's kitchen, glorious-- lowers my shoulder blades by at least an inch. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Sue! It seems I’ve started a habit of making art from fruit - it’s funny how things turn out!
There was always exciting stuff going on in Mum’s kitchen - and there still is, which is wonderful! There’s a cucumber glut in their garden (and therefore also their kitchen) at the moment - hmmmm, now there’s an idea…….
Oh, I can't wait. I truly love artwork depicting fruit. 💚
After reading this wonderful post, I had to go scrub my purple fingers and my purple teeth. You made this tale absolutely, juicily delicious.
You’ve made me laugh sooooo much with this lovely comment, Sharron! Thank you!
Painting with blueberries! Yes, a thing I should try - as my hands are stained from them as we speak. I prefer low bush blueberries, and have been blessed to live in a part of the world where they’re plentiful - and even have an uncle who has an acre of low bush blueberries. A childhood chore was to go pick them. We thought we were so clever, eating blueberries in the field when we were denied snacks.
Hurrah for blueberry-stained fingers, Alison!
I can soooo relate to ‘eating blueberries in the field when we were denied snacks’! My guilty secret was picking peapods off the plants and shelling the peas straight into my mouth.
A family member once took himself off to the greenhouse and ate every single tomato from the plants! He wouldn’t go near a tomato for years afterwards, and didn’t start eating them again until well into adulthood.
(We always had plenty to eat: but gosh, those garden temptations were sometimes just too much to bear!)