Golden currants!
Golden currants are ripe!
I did not know this until yesterday, but we have (at least) two kinds of golden currants here. On one kind, the berries go from green to gold to red to nearly black, and are not ripe until the nearly-black stage. That kind tastes, to me, rather too tart (and this is coming from someone who likes unripe grapes). Tastier (to me) are the kind whose berries are ripe when golden. They match the color fo the flowers, and have a delicious sweetness to them.
All currants have an unpleasant astringency when unripe, and I'm told that some individual bushes of currants are astringent even when ripe and the currants from those bushes are best made into jam. Around here, the currant bushes never show the sort of plentiful bounty that the elderberry trees do; I can't imagine ever gathering enough of the tiny fruits for jam.
Up the hill a ways behind my apartment, another kind of currant bush grows. I haven't tried to reach it since the first year here, when a scary lady yelled at me for going up the hill. But the currants are good this year; perhaps this year I will try it again.
I did not know this until yesterday, but we have (at least) two kinds of golden currants here. On one kind, the berries go from green to gold to red to nearly black, and are not ripe until the nearly-black stage. That kind tastes, to me, rather too tart (and this is coming from someone who likes unripe grapes). Tastier (to me) are the kind whose berries are ripe when golden. They match the color fo the flowers, and have a delicious sweetness to them.
All currants have an unpleasant astringency when unripe, and I'm told that some individual bushes of currants are astringent even when ripe and the currants from those bushes are best made into jam. Around here, the currant bushes never show the sort of plentiful bounty that the elderberry trees do; I can't imagine ever gathering enough of the tiny fruits for jam.
Up the hill a ways behind my apartment, another kind of currant bush grows. I haven't tried to reach it since the first year here, when a scary lady yelled at me for going up the hill. But the currants are good this year; perhaps this year I will try it again.