Today, fresh fruit is the last word in food fashion. In addition to being lovely and delicious, fruits help protect us against cardio-vascular diseases and certain forms of cancer, and are rich in fibre, vitamins, and minerals. As a result, we can satisfy our voracious appetites while taking good care of our health. And yet, the average French person eats two to three times less than the amounts recommended by the French national nutrition and health programme (Programme National Nutrition Santé). …which, however, fails to give any precise figures or special recommendations regarding the consumption of roast boar washed down with beer (naturally, our good friends the Gauls eschew excess). Dogmatix wised up long ago. Fresh fruit deserves to be a part of everyone's daily fare, for the pleasures it procures, as well as for the health reasons mentioned above. With a variety of astonishing flavours, all the way from mouth-puckering sour to ambrosial sweetness, fruit favours the senses with rich aromas and colours, and even thrilling tactile sensations (you may be sure that somewhere in his repertoire, Cacofonix has an ode to the peachy complexion of a blushing young Gaulish maiden, although we sincerely hope that you have never had to listen to it). A bowl of fruit makes an ordinary meal a festive occasion. Think now of the fruits of summer, the best season in which to indulge in the pleasures of the orchard: cherries, raspberries, nectarines, plums, peaches, and apricots; watermelon, grapes, and figs; gooseberries, blackberries, strawberries, and pomegranates; blueberries, persimmons, and pears: there's something for every taste and in every hue. Indeed, summer is the season in which the warm rays of a sun at its zenith (if you spent the summer in galoshes and mackintosh, it must be because Cacofonix was in the neighbourhood and had begun to intone the abovementioned ode). Summer is thus the best season in which to harvest fruit, which needs a lot of sun in order to ripen. Strawberries, for example, thrive in full sunlight, and the more a gooseberry bush is exposed to the sunlight, the more abundantly it will bear. But it would be a mistake for you to think that all you have to do is let your berry bushes sit in the sun to taste the fruits of a summer paradise! Quite the contrary: if you dream of a heavenly harvest next summer, you have to cultivate your garden all year round.   If you have planted gooseberries, you'll need the patience of an abstemious saint. It takes almost three years before the bushes really begin to bear. And yet the plants need tender care all year round. In the winter, the gooseberry bush needs humus, and it must be fertilised again, after the harvest. It also requires abundant watering. Lastly, the bush grows larger year by year, and you must ply the pruning shears with cunning to tidy up the branches and prepare the shrub to bear ever more plentiful harvests in the years to come. As for the raspberry, which you planted with its roots in the autumn time, shovelling on a generous layer of manure to nourish it through the winter and pampering it with plenty of water (when Cacofonix doesn't sing enough to bring regular rains), it has an extremely limited life span: a maximum of one year! That means that, when harvest time is over, you must dispose of all the canes which bore fruit, and replace them with the most promising young offshoots. As you see, all fruits require special attention. In order to become an expert grower, you must take the time to get to know each one well. Only then can you salivate at the thought of the plentiful harvests to come. By then, you'd surely become a fruit addict, and you would quickly decide that the fruits of summer should be eaten all year round. It would be time for you to think of frozen and dried summer fruits, and other preserves, which will enable you to taste the joys of summer in every season, without having the sky fall on your head!