The gooseberries are almost ripe. Yum.

I love having berry bushes in the garden: gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries… They are perfect. While cherry-picking requires a ladder, with a berry bush even kids can just walk up to them and eat. They require little space and little care.

And the harvest is of manageable size, again unlike cherries and apples. I mean, apples are nice and cherries are delicious, but a whole tree’s worth of cherries is too much for just one household. This year we had an exceptionally large cherry harvest – buckets and buckets full – and despite eating our fill, making chutney, squash and cake, we just couldn’t use them all. Even now weeks after the harvest we are still picking masses of fallen, moldy, bird-pecked fruit every day.