Summer Fruits 🍒 🍑 🍉

[vickiespencer]

Today Mr. Spencer and I ventured out to our local Costco to buy fruit. We like to take advantage of the summer months to buy fruits we can not get in Montana in the winter. Today we bought watermelon, bing cherries and peaches. All of these fruits are only available during the summer. Early this summer we also enjoyed one of our favorites blackberries. But they seem to be out of season now. For those who are from other countries and are not familiar with these fruits here are pictures. 

 PEACHES  WATERMELON  BLACKBERRIES BING CHERRIES

So, are there fruit that are seasonal in your country? I am curious to see what summer fruits  you enjoy in your part of the world. 

 

Please post a labeled  image or images of your favorite summer fruits.

Kindly do not spam this thread with nonsense posts such as 

"looks tasty,"  "I like it," "welcome," "always be online," or "fruit is good."  

 

 

[ligiacarvalho]

Growing up in Brazil, we had an abundance of different fruits all year round. Mangos, pineapples, and cashew were some of my favourites. But honestly, I can name a dozen more 😊

[vickiespencer]

3 minutes ago, ligiacarvalho said:

Growing up in Brazil, we had an abundance of different fruits all year round.

We can get all those you mentioned pretty much year around too. Are the cashews raw? Or do you roast and salt them? 

[katakatica]

...But I like it!

So my family doesn't buy fruit (other than watermelon in July/August and some apricots for jams) because we have our own trees/ bushes. Peaches are just going out of season, there was a big storm in April that took a lot of them off but the rest stayed and ripened really nicely. Cherries are more early summer/very late spring 

We put a few bags of sour cherries away too for fruit soup. 

 

Blackberries are just ripening (I'm not home right now as I'm on vacation!) But will ask my mom to make me a few liters of syrup. Strawberries this year were really pricy and not that good, we barely had a few on our hanging plants but even the supermarkets/fruit shops only had eh ones. Oh we also have I think they are called gooseberries in English? We make a sauce out of them (but they were harvested a few weeks ago). Next up I think will slowly be apples and pears - can't wait to make crumbles!

 

Not a fruit but we just harvested our very first eggplant. And purple chilis which is funny because of the colour! 

(Okay that was a lot but you get the picture!)

[ligiacarvalho]

7 minutes ago, vickiespencer said:

Are the cashews raw?

The cashew apple part we used to make juice with it. And the nut part could be either raw or roasted 😊

[jonbaas]

Since I come from the same country as you do, @vickiespencer, I'll drill down to the state level. Were I come from, we are the #1 producer of cranberries in the entire USA. My state, Wisconsin, produced 4.64 MILLION barrels of cranberries in 2020. The next-closest cranberry-producing state is Massachusetts, which produced 2.06 million barrels -- less than half as much as we do.

The USA is the top producer of cranberries in the entire world, so, we know cranberries quite well around here. in fact, the cranberries you have at Thanksgiving, probably come from my home state. 😎

[miiila]

Different kinds of berries.

Plums are starting to appear.

Soon, hops for beer will be here.*

Cherries!

 

 

*Sorry, I know, hops aren't fruit but flowers, but I needed them for the rhyme, I hope that doesn't disqualify my post 😉

[vickiespencer]

30 minutes ago, katakatica said:

we have our own trees/ bushes.

You are a lucky ducky. 🦆

30 minutes ago, katakatica said:

Cherries are more early summer/very late spring 

In Montana we anxiously await the Flathead Cherry season which should be coming very soon. I love the Lamberts, Bing and Mary Anne varieties. We like to go to the orchards and pick some right off the trees. 

30 minutes ago, katakatica said:

fruit soup. 

My grandmother was of Nordic decent and she made fruit soup out of apples, raisins, and prunes. She spiced it with cinnamon and thickened it with tapioca. How did you family make it? 

 

30 minutes ago, katakatica said:

Strawberries

We also have strawberries grown locally and I did buy some today. They were sweet, juicy and good. I paid $4.88 for a larger package. 

30 minutes ago, katakatica said:

Blackberries are just ripening 

Mr. Spencer's favorite berries. He eats way more than I down we buy them. Costco had the smaller containers for $4.99. We said, "nope."

30 minutes ago, katakatica said:

we also have I think they are called gooseberries in English?

I looked that up. I think they are the same as our currants, but maybe not. My dad has a bush of green ones and one of red ones. I see they also come in a blackish purple. 

My dad also has an apple tree that still over produces and he likes to watch the deer from his dinning room window when they come in his yard to eat the apples that are on the ground in the winter. My parents also have a number of crabapple trees in different varieties. My mom used to make crabapple pickles. They were seasoned with cinnamon. 

30 minutes ago, katakatica said:

Not a fruit but we just harvested our very first eggplant. And purple chilis which is funny because of the colour! 

Are you farmers? Or do you have a big garden, fruit orchard? My dad is a grain farmer in eastern Montana. 

[vickiespencer]

17 minutes ago, jonbaas said:

Were I come from, we are the #1 producer of cranberries in the entire USA.

Next Christmas and Thanksgiving I will think of you as I eat my cranberry sauce. Of course I can always think of you when I drink my cranberry juice too. 

30 minutes ago, ligiacarvalho said:

The cashew apple part

What! There is an apple part? I had to look that up! So is the nut the part that is at the bottom of the apple? What does the apple taste like? 

  

 

11 minutes ago, miiila said:

Plums are starting to appear.

Plum are out here too. I wanted to buy a box at Costco, but I was not sure we could eat them all before they got old. 

12 minutes ago, miiila said:

Soon, hops for beer will be here.*

My #3 son brews beer as a hobby. His profession is a master distiller at the first distillery in Montana. 

[ligiacarvalho]

13 minutes ago, vickiespencer said:

What! There is an apple part? I had to look that up! So is the nut the part that is at the bottom of the apple? What does the apple taste like? 

Yes! You may be able to find cashew juice in the US. We can find it here in Canada in Portuguese markets.

It tastes a little acid but sweet at the same time. Hard to explain. It is a little astringent, but very yummy. 😊

[krheate]

I'm also from the US, and my favorite summer fruits are mangos, which I get from Costco lol!

[lilychinadancer]

My city has a lot of fruits , Pitaya, litchi, grape, longan, Hami melon, peach, wampee, or much more then 20 kind of differents ,here is some fruits what I often eat ( Well ,Cucumber and carrot slices are not fuits 😄  ) 

[lenasemenkova]

Watermelons are a big deal in Ukraine. They grow in Southern regions of the country and in August (late July if the weather is very hot) they get transported all over via barges. There is a meme going around with an arial photo of such barge and a caption that says: “Prepare your bladders”. 

Summer watermelons cost next to nothing and are really good (especially comparing to that overpriced, tasteless, chemicals-ridden travesty you can buy in winter). The only problem is to find a watermelon of a reasonable size. They’re huge and very heavy so you’re really have to commit to go out and buy one and preferably get it small enough so it can be finished in one sitting so you don’t have to scrub your fridge afterwards. 

I’m more into melons myself. I don’t think we grow a lot of them locally but it’s just so much easier to buy one and enjoy. It doesn’t have to be this grand event every time. 

Also, grapes. My grandad was a very enthusiastic (and very amateur) gardener and that’s the time of the year he’d start making wine from his own grapes. He screwed up my taste in wine with his experiments. I like a lot of sugar in my wine because that's how he'd insisted on making it and that's what I thought wine was supposed to taste like. 🙂

2 hours ago, lilychinadancer said:

wampee

What does it taste like? They’re selling these in an “exotic” section in a supermarket next to me and I’m intrigued but also a bit terrified. 

[mariashtelle1]

Oh my phone just a couple of days ago reminded me of a picture that I made from my home town in Russia. Most people have their summer gardens there and we had loads of fruits growing there. It was such a pleasure coming there and eating fruits right from the plants. 
And the picture is of strawberries, we had so many of them that every weekend we would collect this huge amounts of strawberries 🍓 eating them fresh, making jams, freezing them for the winter. Sometime it was even too many for us to handle it. 
 

we would get this amount of strawberries every weekend 👇 

[katakatica]

11 hours ago, vickiespencer said:

How did you family make it? 

We actually have a similar fruit soup to that as well but thicken it with corn starch or flour (I'm honestly not sure) OR with pudding (which is what my mom does. Well, pudding powder). So in my family we mostly have two kinds of berry soup - the homemade version OR the store version. Store version is the easiest one, just whisk the powder up with milk and add in the fruit, I'm pretty certain that one needs 0 heat (so it foolsafe, which is a good thing for rookie cooks like me and my sister!) 
My mom's version is just whatever berries/fruits we have, she thickens it with pudding... I think she ads sweetener, too (not 100% sure!)
 

 

11 hours ago, vickiespencer said:

My mom used to make crabapple pickles. They were seasoned with cinnamon. 

Those sound amazing! We make compote out of them, the ones here (well, a thome...) are a tad too sour to eat just on their own!

 

 

11 hours ago, vickiespencer said:

Are you farmers? Or do you have a big garden, fruit orchard? My dad is a grain farmer in eastern Montana. 

So we aren't actual farmers but my mom minds the neighbour's grape garden (they are too old to do it themselves), we just have half the hill as ours basically. Unfortunately this is our last year here though, the EU wants bigger highways (we live near one of the smaller ones) and our house will, in 2-3 years become, well, part of the highway. It's a bit upsetting but we are trying to look for a new place with a similar-sized garden and just as many trees if possible! I'll mostly be sad for my late grandpa's pear tree (It's been there for over 20 years, the rest are new!)

Ah, we also have a few rows of grapes, make some wine ourselves too but just enough to sip on (or pálinka, which is a very strong alcohol!) Not much anymore though!

 

57 minutes ago, lenasemenkova said:

They’re huge and very heavy so you’re really have to commit to go out and buy one and preferably get it small enough so it can be finished in one sitting so you don’t have to scrub your fridge afterwards. 

I think here you can buy only smaller parts of it (for a price though, of course...and it's not that fresh since it's been cut up!) but it's better for solo people! 

 

58 minutes ago, lenasemenkova said:

I like a lot of sugar in my wine because that's how he'd insisted on making it and that's what I thought wine was supposed to taste like. 🙂

You don't want to know how much sugar we put in last year (I was helping my mom with the neighbours'! It was crazy! I had no idea before - I was always too young to really understand and then I was busy (either studying or in a different country!) seeing the process from finish to end made me respect the craft a lot more though. 

[rabiul2222]

10 hours ago, krheate said:

 

We are familiar to eat Sobeda and Mango. Oh there is also a fruit called jaam in summer. There is also Dragon 

download.jfif download (1).jfif

[mariashtelle1]

I have a couple of berries that I really miss and couldn’t get them in Europe or in Asia. 
we had all of them growing in our garden (apart from cloudberry, it’s a wild berry) 
 

I’ll write a list: 

1. gooseberries 

2. sea buckthorn

3. cloudberry

4. Small strawberry (it’s not really a strawberry, it’s way smaller and much sweeter) 

5. honeysuckle
6. red and white currant

[lilychinadancer]

1 hour ago, lenasemenkova said:

 

尝起来怎么样？他们在我旁边一家超市的“异国情调”部分出售这些产品，我很感兴趣，但也有点害怕。 

wampee ? It takes good to me , but some taste sour,  Some are only sweet, depending on maturity,  Some are sweet and sour , I'm not often use this 😄

[miiila]

2 hours ago, mariashtelle1 said:

every weekend we would collect this huge amounts of strawberries 🍓

Your picture makes me want to run and get strawberries from that stall that sells local ones right now.

As a child, I lived in the middle of nowhere (by our standards) for a while, right next to forest,
the wild forest strawberries must range among the best things I've ever had.
An hour or two into the forest and up a hill, there also was a spring. Bliss.
But I'm getting too far off topic, water is no more a fruit than hops or beer are. 🙂

These days, most people are too concerned about foxes with rabies or tapeworm licking at strawberries 😉 
or forest birds with avian flu, or boars with swine fever,
or other real or imagined hazards to allow their children to eat anything to be found outside of grocery stores, markets, and gardens.

Although, maybe now, they are more concerned about bought fruit that might have been touched by people infected with Covid.
I've read about people wiping down everything they buy with disinfectant,
but I suspect that fruit that's been disinfected or washed with soap for 20 seconds min might not taste too well.

[the_mad_duck]

Up in the Virginia and West Virginia areas, blackberries grow wild! You can even find them on the side of the road!

[the_mad_duck]

2 hours ago, mariashtelle1 said:

4. Small strawberry (it’s not really a strawberry, it’s way smaller and much sweeter) 

These grow around here, I believe they are commonly known as "Dupes" or the false strawberry. You'll find them growing on very small ground plants in the grass, was that the case for you?

[mariashtelle1]

12 minutes ago, the_mad_duck said:

You'll find them growing on very small ground plants in the grass, was that the case for you?

Yes! that’s how they grow 

the same as @miiila we used to collect them in the forests (but we also grew them in our garden) alongside with blueberries (but of course smaller blueberries, not the big ones that you can find in the supermarket 🙈). 
 

26 minutes ago, miiila said:

As a child, I lived in the middle of nowhere

Same here 🙈
Though I would still eat them just from the plant in the Forrest. That’s when they are the tastiest and I don’t have patience to bring them all the way home and wash them 

[leannelrivers]

I don't have a picture but right now it's cherry picking time. There are cherry trees everywhere where I live. There's a plum tree in the community garden where I volunteer too, they'll be ready soon. We get a "bio-box" every two weeks from a local farm and it's always a nice surprise because you never know what you're going to get. Just laaak a box o' choclits. 

[lenasemenkova]

How do you call these in English? It can’t be “sweet cherry”, can it? I just realised that I have no idea. Google says “cherry” but cherry is more sour, with a sharper taste. It’s for making pies and jam.

This one’s just sweet, you can it eat it from the tree. And you usually can't stop. 

UPD: Oh, it’s “bing cherries” and it’s spelled out right in the top post. I took a quick glance and thought those were nanking cherries (which we also have but they’re a bit more niche and harder to get). Ignore my question, let’s just all look at the berries. 

[mohon2233]

Litchi