Fruits Exotic And Familiar

Day 353: The "fruits of my labours" are beginning to roll in. Although this year saw some notable failures (blueberries, particularly), it also brought abundance in some corners. The raspberry crop promises to be one of the best yet (at least, if all those busy little bees have anything to say about it), and the Akebia vine has again responded well to my intervention as a pollinator. Admittedly, Akebia fruits are not everyone's cup of tea. It took me several years to develop a taste for the mildly sweet but otherwise relatively flavourless pulp, and even longer to master the art of slurping it off the numerous large, hard seeds, but now I look forward to the splitting of the pods which signals that the fruit is ripe for picking. This year's crop seems sweeter than that of years past, perhaps because I watered less even though the summer was quite dry. In another corner of the garden, a mere half dozen hardy kiwi berries hang on the vines, hard as little rocks, but the first the vines have produced nevertheless. Will they make it to fully ripe before first frost? The next few weeks will tell.