Farmer's Market -- 5 July 2025 (Red Currant Day, 17th of Harvest, Year 233)

[neotoma]

Bacon-cheese wheel, almond croissant, apricots (!!), red plums, strawberries, yellow raspberries, black raspberries, sour cherries (pie!), donut nectarines, strawberry lemonade, a gallon of herbal lemonade, brown sugar kettle corn, caramel kettle corn.

Next week I will buy red sweet cherries (for ketchup) and peaches (for salsa), and actually enter my canning in the county's agricultural fair this year.

Fun fact, red currants used to be illegal to plant in the United States -- they are the second host for white pine blister rust disease, and that is a threat to the lumber industry as white pine is very susceptible to it. This is why purple candy in the USA is grape-flavored, while in Europe purple candy is currant-flavored; we didn't *have* currants (or gooseberries) legally for almost 100 years.

Comments

[delphi]

That all sounds so delicious! And I'm curious now whether currants were ever formally illegal in Canada. I've lived in areas here where they're cultivated or grow wild, but Canada's more aligned with the US in terms of a lack of currant-flavoured sweets or juices (and surely had similar concerns about the lumber industry).