Berries

This summer we've had a good amount of both sun and rain. This has resulted in a humongous amount of berries!

Edit: Ugh! I spent so much time placing these pictures side by side... I should've guessed it wouldn't look like that once I published this! That's why this looks all wonky... I blame Blogger, argh!

We picked loads and loads of wild strawberries! (metsämansikka)

We made a cute cake with these but I can't find a picture...

We bought garden strawberries! (puutarhamansikka) That's my birthday cake :)

The wild strawberries were the only type of berries that I actually picked myself. After that I've mainly focused on the photography and eating side of things... Here are some blueberries! (mustikka)

(Obviously there are some wild strawberries there as well!)

My mum and brother have made about 20 blueberry pies. Also, blueberries in milk - very very nice.

Moving on to our garden raspberries! (vadelma/vaapukka)

Some raw ones...

And our wild raspberries. (villivadelma/metsävaapukka)

This is mum's wild raspberry - redcurrant pie! 1. Before oven 2. Going into the oven 3. Coming out of the oven 4. Eating

Also, we have bushes and bushes of redcurrant (punaherukka/punaviinimarja)

and blackcurrant (mustaherukka/mustaviinimarja)

and gooseberries (karviainen)

The common sea-buckthorn (tyrnimarja) in our garden... These are still raw, they turn bright orange when they're ripe! Apparently they contain huge amounts of vitamin C. But they taste very tart.

These are raw berries on a rowan tree (pihlajanmarja). They're starting to turn red now!

Stone brambles (lillukka) are not as common as the others and we don't pick them, but we see them occasionally!

Two other popular Finnish berries are the lingonberry (puolukka) and Rubus chamaemorus (apparently it has quite a few common names in English including knotberry, bakeapple, cloudberry and evron... in Finnish it's called lakka or hilla or muurain!) but I don't have pictures of them. Click on the names, and you'll see the wikipedia articles on them, with pictures! Knotberry is considered a nice berry in cakes, but I don't really like it... Lingonberry is quite sour but it makes nice jam and goes well with certain Finnish foods :P There's also some nice Finnish chocolate with lingonberry in it...