I’ve been harvesting blackberries for a few weeks. I wash them 0.5kg at a time - two few-minute soaks in a bowl where they’re covered with water. The first and second soaks between them usually flush out, say, 3-6 larvae of some insect or other from each 0.5kg of berries. To start with the larvae are tiny but after a couple of weeks they appear at the ‘3-4mm long’ stage.
This year the washing flushed a total of 3 larvae out of 4-5kg of berries over the first couple of weeks. I blamed the wet spring for hitting whatever lays the eggs very hard indeed. The larvae numbers are rising again now though and aren’t much different from normal although the larvae are still very small for this time in the season.
On a point of detail, they don’t usually drown. I fish them out and squash them. The fact is though that once I’ve picked the berries the critters inside them are done for, one way or another.
The plant universe is putting up a decent fight, but judging by what I saw on my walk yesterday, the slow inexorable descent to the point where the entire planet is covered by some combination of brambles and stinging nettles is well under way. Critters that live on brambles are the new cockroaches. They’ll be here when everything else is gone.
Well this is fun, after months of doing nothing (apart from attracting snails) the scotch bonnet plant has sprouted four iddy biddy chillies in the space of 48 hours.
This cheeky bastard nicking all our walnuts of the two trees, cherries and peaches. At least there were no plums this year and the Pears were too large!
