The red white and blue…. and green, of ripening black raspberries
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| By this afternoon ripe black mulberries will be gone. The red ones will be ripe tomorrow morning, and I will have to get a ladder and fight the squirrels and birds to get a mouthful. |
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One
of my readers told me recently that he thought my newspaper column last year
about how I love to eat the buds of those orange day-lilies, which are thicker
in the summer than thorns on a locust, was all a tongue-in-cheek effort to try
to get gullible folks to do something silly. But people, I am as serious as three-day blizzard when I say
that those buds, cut just before they bloom, are delicious. And they are growing
large now all over the Ozarks.
The
reader remembered the column I wrote telling folks I had envelopes filled with
nearly invisible morel mushroom seeds for sale for a five dollars each and the
one where I said that raw gizzard shad soaked in catsup tasted just like
sardines. I regret those feeble
attempts at humor at the expense of others and if I could retract what I said
about boiled tadpoles and ‘turnip green-chicken hawk’ casserole, I would do it
in a minute.
But
that’s the truth about day-lily buds.
Sautee them like asparagus or roll them in eggs and flour and fry them
and you will be amazed how good they are. In fact they have been called ‘poor
man’s asparagus’. But I like them
fried crispy rather than like soft asparagus. They grow all over my place here on Lightnin’ Ridge and I
like them so much that none hardly ever get to bloom! Don’t take my word for it; ask someone who is honest and
trustworthy!!!
There
is also a big mulberry tree a short distance from my porch, which has ripening
berries. We have a bunch of
mulberry trees here, but most don’t produce fruit. The female trees bear a fruit that starts green, turns red,
and then black. When they are
black, they are delicious and sweet.
Uncle Roy use to make wine out of them, but heck, Uncle Roy made good
wine out of about everything. I
can’t get to the mulberries without a ladder and the doggone birds and
squirrels around here don’t leave many ripe ones.
I
was sitting on my porch this morning early and watched a pair of red-bellied
woodpeckers light on the tree. One
flew up to grab a mulberry in flight.
I have never seen that before.
The gray squirrels hang upside down from their back feet to reach out
and grab ripe mulberries, and blue-jays and cardinals get the rest. Mulberries are beautiful trees with big
leaves and trunks which are a seldom bigger than six or eight inches at the
base.
Cardinals
also are working on the black raspberries which grow around us at the edge of
the woodland just off what I jokingly refer to as a lawn. These white, red and bluish-black
berries against the green leaves make the most beautiful picture. My daughter Christy joined me on Sunday
afternoon to pick about a gallon of them but there are plenty left if someone
wants to come up here and help themselves to them. The wooded ridge-top also
has an abundance of gooseberries, and they are green. They aren’t worth much, but my daughter makes gooseberry
pies out of them that are tart and delicious.
I
intend to eat some of these young gray squirrels soon, but it is impossible to
shoot any close to my porch, where they fight with the doves and make a mess of
any bird feeders you fill. You get
to where you know each of them too well to shoot them. They are lucky I am of a different
mindset now than I was when I was 15 and our family couldn’t afford hamburger.
During
the winter the rascals chew out a big hole in the entrance to my bluebird house
so I have to fix it every spring, tacking on a new board with a hole only an
inch and a half round, ‘cause that’s what bluebirds like.
A
doe has a fawn up here between the office window and the pond somewhere, and
that is a mixed blessing. She’s
pretty, but she also has eaten the top out of one of our tomato plants. I like summer tomatoes grown from my
garden more than anything else we grow, so she is treading on dangerous ground
there.
I
worry about ground nesting birds up here on Lightnin’ Ridge because there are
so many egg eaters.
Armadillos top the list and we need to kill those intruders from the
southwest every time we see one.
There are more than just quail to worry about. I am really not hearing very many whippoorwills or
chuck-wills-widows up here like I did 20 years ago. I am certain that is due to the increase in egg eaters,
mostly the armadillo but also black snakes, raccoons, possums and skunks. There are way too many of all of
them. I miss the whippoorwill calls
we use to hear so many of.
You will never find a whippoorwill nest because they don’t make one,
they just lay their eggs in leaves on the forest floor. There isn’t any great concern about
them yet but there should be. They
are declining, year after year. So
are meadowlarks.
The
heavy spring rains are tough on ground-nesters too, especially quail, turkey
woodcock and killdeer. I’ll bet
the wild turkey poults have taken a real blow because of it. If young poults
get drenched, they usually won’t survive. The spring hatch has to be poor, but there will be some late
nesting that will help, when the rains have ended. BUT… the heavy rain and rising, holding water levels
will help fish spawning. Low water
is the nemesis of spawning fish, especially dropping water levels, which fish
can sense, a situation that keeps them from having a successful spawn.
Not
a whole lot was said about it, but a couple of weeks ago a man in his thirties
was bitten by a cottonmouth while wading in the James River. He went home without any medical
attention and died during the night.
Enough
of this “snakes are our friends” nonsense when it causes people to think
poisonous ones are not dangerous.
Peddling this over the last twenty years, those ‘experts’ who work for
the Department of Conservation almost always live in city suburbs. Real
outdoorsmen and country people know that poisonous snakes are very, very
dangerous and their presence where people live, work and play is a threat.
If
you are bitten, treat it like a heart attack, and get to the hospital
quick. And eliminate any
rattlesnakes, cottonmouths and copperheads you come across. Believe me, we aren’t going to put any
of those on an endangered species list!
After
writing about the MDC’s media specialist statement that just because more mountain
lion are being seen it doesn’t mean there are more of them, a reader sent me
the following, sent out in a news release from that state agency. Surely it is just meant to make us
smile…
Jeff
Briggler and other workers at the Missouri Department of Conservation have made
informal observations over the years, counting the number of dead turtles –
especially box turtles – on stretches of highway. “We discovered that mortality rates are very high on high-traffic
roads,” says Briggler, “whereas mortalities are much lower on less-traveled
roads.”
Those
folks are paid well for that kind of scientific observation.
You can write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613 or email me at
lightninridge47@gmail.com
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