August 4, 2013
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Blackberries
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 acreage 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!
Dead Turkey Joke of the Day A man runs to the doctor and says, "Doctor, you've got to help me. My wife thinks she's a chicken!"
The doctor asks, "How long has she had this condition?"
"Two years," says the man.
"Then why did it take you so long to come and see me?" asked the shrink.
The man shrugs his shoulders and replies, "We needed the eggs."
Today's YouTube Tune
What is your favorite berry?
Comments (13)
gee...I don't know...strawberrys, blackberries, raspberriesthey are mostly all good to me...and for me too
what ^she^ said
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....................................
We have wild raspberries and they are terrible to pick. Ow..ow! I'm with flash ^ what they said.
Black raspberries!
Neat!
we used to pick them as kids and they have thorns. we would throw a ladder over the bushes so we could climb and pick
barriesssssssssss. All are good one. Love it.
When I lived in Pennsylvania, we had these in our woods. The thorns were worth the berries! My mom use to make a cobbler with them if we picked enough. As an adult, I'm a little grossed out about how much blood was probably in it too.
Your topmost photo is of mulberries, not blackberries. I am a nit picker. Mulberries grow on trees, and they ripen several weeks later than blackberries. But they taste about the same.
@we_deny_everything - Yes! I have picked both mulberries and blackberries. Had a mulberry tree in my back yard as a child.It would seem if you are correct, the following 3 sites also misidentified the berries in the picture:http://www.bigdipperfarm.com/cgi-bin/searchstuff.pl?Common=Blackhttp://wayhaven.blogspot.com/2011/11/fun-with-blue-plastic-barrels.htmlhttp://www.theextraordinaryberry.com/The mulberry trees I recall had very large leaves, and none were in proximity to where the fruit attached to the stem.Blackberries on the other hand, had a little leafy structures where the stem attached to the fruit.But I am not a botanist.As to the taste, I always preferred the flavor and texture of blackberries.
There were lots of wild blackberries around on the outskirts of Medellín where I lived in my childhood. Colombian blackberries are very tart, probably because they're in the tropics and don't get hit by frost. I used to love blackberry juice and blackberry jam because they were tangy compared to other fruits.
LOL, that joke is hilarious yet also borderline WEIRD!!! lolI remember picking and eating blackberries from the vine when I was young. Soooo yummy!!!