The Scope

How to pick berries

Ever wonder why the highways are lined with people’s upturned rears every year towards the end of the summer? Those are berry picker bums. Berry picking fever usually strikes with the first ripening of blueberries on the Avalon, at the beginning of August. Wild blueberries grow on low-lying, scruffy bushes in open, exposed places, like the back of Signal Hill. Blueberry season usually lasts until the beginning of September.

Also in the genus Vaccinium, partridgeberries (or lingonberries, or foxberries, or quailberries, or red berries) are like mini cranberries, and they ripen in mid-September. They grow on squat evergreen shrubs in dry, peaty soils and rocky, barren, and coastal areas. You should wait until after the first frost to pick them, as there’s a little worm, the lingonberry fruitworm, that burrows into the fruit and lives there until it dies in the cold.

Over in the bogs, marshes and squishier meadows, you can find bakeapples from August into September. When ripe, they look like amber-colored raspberries, and they taste a bit like plastic bags. Accordingly, they usually wind up in jams and syrups alongside a hearty dose of sugar.

Strawberry and Raspberry U-Pick farms are easy to come by, although they’ll likely come later this year on account of that nasty little overnight frost on June 17th. Lester’s Farms estimates that their strawberry U-Pick will be ready by the end of July.

Map: Best places to swim outdoors in and around St. John’s

There are plenty of ponds and lakes in and around St. John’s, but not all of them are suitable for a dip. So where do you find outdoor swimming action?

Try some of these popular swimming spots, which we culled from our annual Best of St. John’s survey.

We haven’t verified these, and no swimming spot is 100 per cent safe anyway, so swim at your own risk.

If we missed your favorite spot, send us an email at swim@thescope.ca or leave a comment below and we’ll add it to the list.

Click here to see a larger version of this map

Also, if you’ve been swimming at any of these locations, feel free to let us know what your experience was in the comments.

How to Compose a Harbour Symphony

“Here in St. John’s, we have this wonderful bowl-shaped harbour which is nothing else but a wonderful auditorium,” explains singer, musician, and Sound Symposium Coordinator Delf Hohmann. Every second year, the Sound Symposium exploits the harbour’s acoustics with the Harbour Symphony, a daily symphony played by the horns of the ships that happen to be in the harbour.

Composers typically write the symphony with the hopes that six or seven boats will be down there to participate, explains Hohmann. Each boat gets its own timed score covered in symbols, placed at specific times, that indicate the type of horn blast to be played. “You have maybe a line for a long blast, a circle for a little woot,” says Hohmann. “Once you’ve done it several times and you know which boats come into the harbour, you know the character of their horns. All the supply ships that go out to the oil rigs have fairly high-pitched horns compared to the coast guard vessels. The ice breakers have two horns, because they have to signal backwards, if there are ships behind them, when they slow down or speed up breaking the ice in front. There are actually vessels there that have three horns.”

One the morning of the symphony, Hohmann hops on his bike and rides down the hill to talk to the ship captains and get the okay from the Harbourmaster. The Coast Guard does the countdown on the Ship to Shore radio. While on the boats, one person keeps time with a stopwatch, telling the other, the “player,” when to sound the horn.

The result is not always what the composer had intended.

“The beautiful thing about the harbour symphony,” chuckles Hohmann, “is that you compose a piece, and you know what it’s going to sound like on paper, but there’s always a compromise. Depending on the wind direction, the wind speeds, sometimes you get an echo that takes seven seconds, sometimes you don’t have one at all. It can be an improvisation in terms of what nature does with it.”

The ships’ horns aren’t always on cue, either. “When you push the button for the horn on the ship, sometimes it takes a while for the steam or the air to build up in the pipe, and so the horn just goes ‘pfrrrrrt!‘” he says.

“Some composers have, at times, not recognized their own piece, because it was so off!” he laughs. “They go off, and they huff and puff about it, but when we explain the story and all that can happen, they’re happy about it.”