Dear Curiosity Journal,
Better late than never. This is what I tell myself as I head out to glean elderberries, my delayed attempt to gather what the birds have left on the branches, which isn’t much. I’m a little sad to say my elderberry haul is small this season for a few reasons. First, I harvested a lot of elderflowers, which was wonderful, but limited the berry harvest. Secondly, I usually harvest in mid to late August, so I’m coming onto the scene a bit too late because life got busy. Finally, the large and diverse bird population on the farm does not sleep on elderberries. They know where the goods are and gobble them up in legions, fueling up for fall migration, and dropping purple poops across the land. I’m not mad at them. We always share in the elderberry harvest. My cut is just smaller this year. However, I did find an abundance of wild grapes and apples on my adventure and brought home all I could carry. Upon returning, I slipped into the meditative trance of the repetitive task of garbling berries, removing spheres from stem, sorting and culling, setting the elderberries into the dehydrator, then boiling and crushing the grapes into jelly, getting into a state of gratitude for autumn abundance.
~Joy
