The biggest raspberry in the world . . .

. . . or the one that got away!

I've hardly had chance to get out into the garden this week - there has been torrential rain with a stiff breeze, punctuated by short - very short - spells of bright sunshine. No sooner to get I get my clogs on and head out of the door, than the heavens dump on me again.

But this afternoon I got a decent interval to catch up on some outdoor chores when it remained dry and the air was nice and warm.

As blogged previously, I have some raspberry canes which have done better at actually producing fruit this year than in recent years, largely due to the warm sunny spell we had a week or two ago - I think that was the summer of 2009 and is nothing but a distant memory now. So I had a few fruits to pick that I could see through the foliage. After the poor performance of my canes in recent summers, I planted two new pots of a different variety and the fruits they produce are fabulous - they're huge, succulent, sweet and flavoursome.

One pot is in a slightly different position than the others and doesn't seemingly get quite as much full sun and I didn't help it by putting the least mature canes in that spot. Consequently, the fruit is somewhat behind the rest of my crop (I use this term very loosely, a handful a day hardly qualifies) and I haven't yet picked any from that pot.

I haven't grown sweet peas for years and these are my first blooms this year.

They're such a vibrant colour that you would think it was man-made.

But the largest raspberry that was furthest on had reached absolute perfection today - it was perfectly ripe, flawless and absolutely mahoosive. This was perhaps the largest raspberry I've ever seen - absolutely gi-huge - certainly the largest I've grown by a significant margin. It was displaying itself proudly at the front of the bough, with a perfect bright green leaf either side of it and a cluster of smaller paler fruits behind. This needed to be recorded for posterity. Whilst my camera was to hand, the memory card was in the card reader upstairs.

This is not the raspberry in question, I took this a while ago to show the average size of the fruits these new canes produce. My fabulous specimen was at least twice this size.

So I returned a little while later with my card, grabbed the camera and headed outside to record this behemoth specimen of raspberry-dom. I actually did a physical double take. I took a few steps back and re-traced my steps, wondering if it had been on the other pot, not the one I was looking at. My prize raspberry was nowhere to be seen. All that remained was a shiny cream coloured hull and two or three pink drupelets of the fruit remaining.

Stop thief!

Someone had stolen my raspberry! I would have taken a photo of the crime scene, but I was too flabbergasted to think to at the time. I can only assume a bird has taken it, but there's not really anywhere for a bird to perch whilst harvesting the booty and I rarely get birds in that garden because it is so enclosed within steep walls.

So now no one will believe how truly fabulous it was - but I swear - it was . . . . this . . . big!

Thankfully my tomatoes are still right where they should be.
But I shall be organising surveillance as they ripen.