Jul 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Betsy Spethmann

The raspberries ripen this month.

My family inherited a modest patch of raspberry plants when we bought our house. It has tripled in size the last few years, blithely crowding out an ornamental crabapple to the west and snaking around the garden shed to the east. Daylilies used to bloom along the sunny wall of the shed, but forget that. The raspberries moved in and the daylilies moved over in the stubborn, quiet way that gardens have.

Each summer the patch gets wilder and taller and more marvelously chaotic. It makes the word “bramble” feel full in your mouth. It dismays our one tidy neighbor and delights the hobby farmer who raises chickens next door. (That's his rooster you hear crowing over my phone.)

So the raspberries thrive under our general neglect. Still, the bushes need one serious session of pruning each fall or spring. A raspberry cane bears fruit in its second year; then it withers and dies as a new cane grows up beside it. Last year's dead canes need to be pulled out to make room for this year's bloom — and the green shoots that are next year's fruit and this year's investment. It's pretty cool, in a geeky, gardener-philosopher kind of way: Three generations right there together, all spiraling out from the same ball of roots. The stages of a lifecycle all visible at the same time.

Until the old canes get tossed.

No one else in my family likes this job. For me, clearing canes is meditation. I wade into the thorny mess, hunt out dead brown branches and twist them off with a satisfying snap. Grab, snap, pitch. Grab, snap, pitch. Three hours of that and you find Zen.

The new canes grow in different directions, so the patch has new paths each year. The maze reinvents itself inside even as it creeps farther across the lawn. I ford new trails in May, then ignore the whole jumble — until now, when the berries ripen.

The raspberries set our cadence for July. Just when dog days are looming, they go from hard, white nuggets to those delicate globes that feel like a flower on your tongue. Four dollars a pint doesn't seem outrageous.

For all the languor of summer, berries ripen — and overripen — fast. Word spreads among the neighbors and kids come with old ice cream buckets and Tupperware. They pick haphazardly, and ring the doorbell afterwards to say thank you.

For two weeks or so I pick berries twice a day, mosquitoes be damned. The freezer fills up. Raspberries will tide us through winter, a hand-picked crimson coping mechanism for five months of snow. Muffins, pancakes, ice cream with hot fudge — comfort food, indeed. Our luxury at the height of July is fresh raspberry pie, or cereal with berries picked straight into the bowl.

Our local newspaper used to host a pie-baking contest each summer. The editor, the mayor and the high school principal judged two dozen or so pies, which were served up to the crowd after the winner was crowned. We entered blueberry-raspberry our first year; it was full-on raspberry by the time they quit having the contest. (Someone, I suspect, finally raised the question of liability that comes from serving home-baked pies to a trusting crowd of strangers.)

This may all be too bucolic and precious for marketers in the throes of 2005 planning. What's the point of raspberries when there are briefs to write, strategies to set, deadlines to meet, brands to build?

The connection is simple: When you make a plan, set the basics — then let it grow its own way. When your moment ripens, harvest like hell.

And leave room for new vines to take root. Then you'll still be eating pie two years from now.

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