wild edible fruit

Vashon is rainforest.  Cool and wet lushness.  Walking the wide shoulders on the island Matt and I are amazed...giant trees!  ant colony!  mule deer!  towering thistles!  The most amazing, as you may have guessed, are the bountiful edible fruiting plants that occur in the wild.  Blackberry is the most prevalent and it lines the roads.  Their fruits are probably a week from ripening which will coincide perfectly with our return from California.  Currently ripe are the WILD BLACK CHERRIES that we found strolling back from the coffee shop. 

The roasterie is the original Seattle's Best Coffee and is constantly smelling of burnt toasty coffee roasting.  Loud popping happens when the beans are cooling in the big open topped drum.  It's a nice atmosphere in which to read the paper.  The 'local' big news of the moment is that Starfucks is cutting 1000 jobs and closing hundreds of stores.  Poor thing!  

Walking back from the shop one day I was mildly excited to see some fruit debris on the pavement, "mulberries!", I exclaimed.  Looking up my excitement multiplied in a second as towering above us was a Giant tree loaded with black cherries.  At the peak of ripeness too, tho the low hanging fruit was rare and picked.  This massive tree is around 5 ft in diameter and probably 50 ft tall.  Matt climbed up to get a few more handfulls of fruit--but still most of it was out of reach.  Today, tho, we will return to score more after rigging up a pole picker.  Yum!

Two other varieties of cherries have presented themselves to us.  One was a small red variety, sweet, but no match for the black ones.  The other variety was a tart pie cherry we sampled then moved along down the road.  Amazing.  

Having lots of free time is a mixed blessing.  My hobbies have dropped off in the last years as work and fixing the house dominated my time.  What do I like to do?  The main diversion for now is playing music, I on the banjo-ukulele and Matt on the fiddle.  My uke is small for travel and is a nice sounding instrument.  I play back up rhythm to his melodies.  I also like to read.  For the upcoming family reunion (Cartier) in California we're having a 'book club' and reading a young adult novel, The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly.   What else...can't garden and travel...can juggle...can't go to various meetings...can go to museums.  It is nice to have a writing outlet as this too has dropped off since school.