Kamikaze Berry Picker

Blueberries, strawberries and blackberries are true super food. Naturally sweet and juicy, berries are low in sugar and high in nutrients – they are among the best foods you can eat. ~Joel Fuhrman

Have you ever been blackberry picking? Not in a nicely mowed around tame blackberry patch but a wild blackberry patch out in the woods and fields of a farm?

I have. Many times. When I was a kid, Mom and us girls would all be out with buckets to pick the ripe blackberries. Then we’d come home and help wash them for Mom to make blackberry jam.  When I got married, I still was out in the fields on the hunt for the best blackberries. I knew where the best ones grew on our farm. I still do.

My son and his kids come out to the farm every year to pick enough blackberries to freeze some for cobblers and make that delicious blackberry jam. I still pick plenty myself and have every year. Years ago, someone gave us some starts for boysenberries. Yum, those are the best, but read on to see how the best sometimes has some worst too.

Here’s a blackberry picking story from a few years ago when my daughter-in-law brought the grandkids out to pick enough berries to make jam. I took them to the easy patches where I had seen some good berries, but the deer had beaten us to some of the berries in those patches. The deer do love eating blackberries off the vines. I guess that year they liked the easy patches too. Also, the kids were young and some of them ate two berries for every berry they put in their buckets. The littlest one, who was only two and experiencing her first blackberry picking adventure, kept wanting to pick– out of my bucket! We finally managed to get almost a gallon in all their buckets combined, but they didn’t have time to go to the patch over in the far pasture field. After they left, I decided I was already hot, sweaty, itchy, and scratched up so I might as well get more. So, I went back. I must have been too hot that day to think straight.

If any of you have ever picked blackberries out in the field where the vines grow over your head and mysterious paths tunnel through the bushes, you know that’s where the biggest and best blackberries grow. But you also know there might be snakes under there or even crawling along the top of the briars. That can happen. The stickers don’t seem to bother them much. Back then I was a Kamikaze blackberry picker. When I spotted a big plump berry , I would mash down briars, stick my hand through prickly vines, and do whatever it took to go after that berry. Then when I stretched to finally have my fingers on that delicious berry, half the time I would drop it or it would be too ripe. Or the June bugs had already beat me to it. They seem to like those big, plump, best berries. All that pain would go for naught. I’m older now and mostly a little smarter. I try to only go for the berries that are reachable without leaving too much of my skin on the briars. I try to be oblivious to all those best berries going to waste.

I do still like picking berries. Maybe it’s something about finding my food out in the wild, beating the deer and birds to them, challenging the snakes, picking around the spiders. Who knows why? Anyway a couple of days ago, I went blackberry picking with my daughter who is visiting this week. I have some thornless tame blackberries. They are a treat to pick, but we also went out hunting in the wild for berries. Those boysenberries we used to have in the yard have come up volunteer out in the field, and I can’t resist the opportunity to pick some of them. As always, the best looking berries are just a little out of reach in the overgrown vines that have gone wild now. I pick what I can and tell myself not to worry about those beauties deep in the bushes, but I still reach in to get scratched and poked with thorns.

Boysenberry briars are way worse than blackberry vines. Boysenberry briars lay in wait and grab you even when you think you are out of reach. Don’t ask me how. I think they’re possessed. Even the leaves have stickers. Anyway I only pick those berries for people I love. A lot. Maybe my daughter feels the same and that’s why she was out there with me. All different ways of showing love.

We survived the berry picking and came home with a generous gallon. Plenty enough to make some jam. The picture up top already has some sugar on them. It made a couple more pints than these showing in this picture. We opened one up for breakfast and she packed one up to take home. However, I’m not sure she’ll ever come home to visit during blackberry/boysenberry season again.

Do you have any blackberry picking memories?