May 22, 2006

• Wild Blackberries

  

  
  

  Blackberries on Wikipedia

  
  

  From Wikipedia:

  
  

  
  

  The blackberry is a widespread and well known shrub; a bramble fruit (Genus Rubus, Family Rosaceae) growing to 3 m (10 ft) and producing a soft-bodied fruit popular for use in desserts, jams, seedless jellies and sometimes wine. Several Rubus species are called blackberry and since the species easily hybridize, there are many cultivars with more than one species in their ancestry.

  
  

  The blackberry has a scrambling habit of dense arching stems carrying short curved very sharp spines, the branches rooting from the node tip when they reach the ground. It is very pervasive, growing at fast daily rates in woods, scrub, hillsides and hedgerows, colonising large areas in a relatively short time. It will tolerate poor soil, and is an early coloniser of wasteland and building sites. It has palmate leaves of three to five leaflets with flowers of white or pink appearing from May to August, ripening to a black or dark purple fruit, the "blackberry."

  
  

  

  
  

  Yum! Fresh, wild blackberries! Every summer, around 4th of July, my family would make the trek across the midwest back to the old abandoned family farm in Butler County, Pennsylvania. There were 100 acres of old farmland, with and old farm house and a lot of broken down farm buildings, and a few old discarded vehicles. (That's where my dad got the side lamp off his grandfather's old Model T Ford.) My dad and his brother and brothers-in-law would spend 3 weeks cutting brush and burning it. Half the acerage was covered in pine trees that my dad and his mom had planted in the mid 1920's. The other half was overgrown fields. Oh, and there was a frog pond, too.

  
  

  One of the things the kids would do (besides getting lost in the woods and getting poison ivy rashes, was to collect pots full of wild blackberries! We would eat half the hall before we got back to the old farm house.

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

  Yum! Picked right off the bramble bush!

  
  

   

  
  

  Now the best berries were always deep in the bramble bush, so you invariably got the dickens scratched out of you by the thorns as you waded your way through the bushes. But if anything was worth it, that was. Yum!

  
  

  

  
  

  A measly haul!

  
  

  The picture above is from somebody's Internet site, they were so proud of their haul of blackberries! But this is but a drop in the bucket compared to what we used to haul in! Yum! Now sometimes the brambles cutting into your poison ivy rash was a bit painful - but yum!

  
  

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  What the...?

  
  

  

  
  

  That picture made my hair do this, too!

  
  

  
  

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  Dead Turkey Jokes of the Day How many jugglers does it take to change a light bulb? One, but it takes three bulbs. How many babysitters does it take to change a light bulb? None, Pampers don't come in a size that small. How many beer makers does it take to change a light bulb? About one third less than for a regular bulb.

  
  

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  Have you ever picked and eaten fresh fruit straight off the plant?
  

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  *Edit* OK! I up my bid to one detached SpazTigger tail:

  
  

   

  
  

                     

  
  

  
  

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  *Edit* Hmmmm! I think I'll try thus thing out!

  
  

   

  
  

  Weeeeeeeeeeee!

  • 7:30 am
  • 24 Comments