When I was growing up in Sackville, N.B., there were a lot of raspberry plants near our house. They'd come ripe around late July and we'd pick a whole lot. Some of them we'd put into pies, others we'd make into drinks. We had a recipe for raspberry shrub in our copy of Betty Crocker's Cookbook, which you made by boiling raspberries and adding ginger ale and frozen lemonade.
We also grew strawberries in our back yard garden. In the fall we'd put a layer of mulch and leaves over them to prevent the ground from thawing and refreezing over the winter, because that can uproot the plants. (Robert Frost wrote a poem about protecting an orchard by putting it on a north slope to prevent thawing.)
When I was older we bought a big freezer, so then we could add some sugar to raspberries or to strawberries, freeze them and continue to eat them for months onward. (We froze peas from the garden too.) But sometimes we added too little sugar for my taste.
Some time after we moved to Toronto we discovered a place called Whittamore Farm in Markham where you could pick your own strawberries and raspberries in season. That's always fun, but we no longer have a car to get there. We're city folk now.
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