Flashes of Panic

I didn’t think it was possible to eat enough raspberries that I felt sick, but you really do learn something new every day, I guess.

One of the hangups of fruit and vegetables—particularly the organic grew-it-in-my-yard variety—is that you get none for a long time, and then suddenly you get a lot, all at once. (Zucchini is a great example of this. There is no such thing as enough zucchini, if you’re growing it yourself; there is either none, or too much.)

A’s parents have a raspberry patch, about the size of the fenced-in play area we had in our backyard when I was very small, and when the berries start coming ripe you can pick a liter in about half an hour, probably in excess of a gallon of berries every day. And that’s with a significant amount of the picking going directly from bush to mouth, with no stopping in the picking container. And then, after dinner, you can sit at the table with the container in front of you and eat raspberries until you feel sick, knowing there will be more tomorrow.

Berries—raspberries in particular—are really a stupendous idea, evolutionarily speaking. The plants put a pretty big percentage of their annual energy budget into producing these sweet little fruits surrounding their seeds; then they wither. Untouched, the berries re-seed the patch for another pass next year, but they’re also attractive to a wide variety of animals, from birds to bears. Those animals get a caloric boost and return the favor by (unintentionally) spreading the seeds. It’s a gorgeous system right there, but the berries work another strategy: they ripen in stages (if a deer gets all the ripe ones today, there will be more ripe ones tomorrow) but they all ripen over a short period of time and glut the market (so there are more berries than any one host can monopolize.) There may be some competitive advantage here, too, where the seasons are staggered with other competitive food sources in the area; it forces the berry-browsers to shift around to different sources of food rather than exploiting one past recovery.

Trees do this, too, but the strategy is different. Their seeds tend to be damaged by animal consumption (acorns eaten by squirrels seldom become mighty oaks, though if the squirrel caches them and forgets them they may yet do well.) The trees have “mast years,” where after three or four (or a dozen) years of light seed production, suddenly they will flood the seed market, trying to produce enough seeds to get a few past the consumers.

I wonder, though, if I’m inventing this idea while looking at a relatively artificial (if organic) berry patch. The blackberry and black raspberry patches my father finds on his walk home from work seldom produce at this volume, but they aren’t as large, either. I remember being able to kill ten or fifteen minutes picking wild blueberries in certain spots along the coast, when I was younger; I had a bear’s nose for blueberries then. I was able to spot some atop Katahdin, but not enough to flood any consumer market; I could’ve picked most of the Katahdin patches bare in four or five minutes if I could’ve reached them safely.

Now Playing: You’re Still Beautiful from Gold Afternoon Fix by The Church

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