Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

From time to time I will post things I have previously written and posted on my other, less thematic blog, Foolery.

http://foolery.typepad.com/foolery/

The following post, "Berry-Picking," is from late June of this year. I miss most of each year's berry season due to heat, mosquitos, vacation, and sheer laziness. I'm already grumpy about missing this year's crop, and so I'm posting this here, a eulogy for my favorite fruit.

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Tonight the girls and I headed out for a walk after dinner, since the south wind had come up and it had cooled down quite a bit. We didn't get far before we noticed that the blackberries are ripening! It's a couple of weeks earlier than I was expecting. We scooted back to the house for some containers, then back to the giant briar hedges which separate the east pasture from our neighbors to the north.

We call them blackberries, but they're really Himalayan blackberries (Rubus armeniacus). The hedges grow about 10-12 feet high, and it's anyone's guess how wide they've grown. The entire north hedge burned to the ground about 17 years ago, though you'd never know it now. Foxes, coyotes, and all kinds of birds and field creatures live within the brambles growing over the "creek" which is actually irrigation run-off. Himalayas are a horticultural plague which botanist Luther Burbank introduced to the west coast; kind of like the south's kudzu, only with the most delicious berries you've ever eaten. They are far sweeter than true blackberries, and about twice as large when they're at their peak in mid-July.

It's a long-standing family tradition to make homemade blackberry ice cream for Fourth of July. The tradition persists, whether or not the berries actually ripen in time. This year we're in like Flynn.

As we were picking from the neighbor's side of the thicket, up walked the neighbor with his two daughters. "Hi neighbor!" I said. "We're stealing your berries." He didn't look too concerned.

We picked a vat of berries, and with any luck I'll have enough to make a cobbler this weekend. If I can keep Sparky out of them, that is.