Blackberries in various stages of ripeness -- Photo courtesy Wikipedia
“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.” Elizabeth Lawrence.
Journeys
Growing blackberries was the hot topic of conversation yesterday morning among my circle of writing friends. The chatter took my little gray cells on a journey into the past, back to my preteen years when our family lived with my grandmother.
She had a little house in Fruitdale, a tiny suburb on the outskirts of Dallas, where she raised rabbits, pigs and chickens and grew a large garden. We also had blackberries aplenty, but not from any garden. They grew wild in tangled bushes that covered a huge empty plot of land that stretched from the back of my grandmother’s property to the railroad tracks at least a quarter of a mile away.
When I was about 8, I was allowed to go into that field, unsupervised, with a metal pail that I was expected to bring back full of the sweet juicy fruit. The berries came in three colors, green when they first came on the vine, red as the sun began to ripen them, and finally dark purple when they were sweet and ready to be picked and eaten.
I remember being stung once when picking blackberries. My grandmother put a mixture of cornstarch and vinegar on the ouchie. The picture of this bee polinating a blackberry bush was taken by Jonathan Cardy.
I remember wondering – a kid thing to do but something we should never grow out of – why the berries were called black and not purple. I still don’t know the answer, just that when I returned home with my little pail, usually full, both my hands and my mouth were always stained purple.
“Looks like you ate more than you picked,” my grandmother would say. Then she would reward my efforts with a small a bowl of the berries sprinkled with sugar and covered with the rich cream that used to float to the top of the milk bottle before fat was a bad word.
I’ve never eaten a blackberry again that tasted so good. So this non-gardener wishes my friends the best of luck with their blackberry plants. If they taste half as good as those wild ones of my childhood they will be well-rewarded for their efforts.
Meanwhile, if any of you out there know where a wild, unguarded patch of blackberries grow, I suggest you visit it — and be sure and take a pail along.
Pat Bean's blog 
Those berries look so yummy!
I picked blueberries when I was a child, filling my stomach up with them as I was trying to fill the bucket tied to my waist. I’m pretty sure I ate as many as I brought back.
I don’t care for blackberries, except when I come across them unexpectedly and my husband is with me, or I have something with me to carry some home to him. Blackberries mean chiggers to me. lol! But Charlie loves them, so I’m always happy to find some unexpectedly.
Thanks for another spark of joy in the morning. 🙂
MA
After we talked about this, Lee, I remembered another story about the very same ravine berries in Washington state. My folks went to visit relatives a few summers ago and Daddy tells the story of my MOTHER standing down there stuffing her face with berries! She’ll tell you she just couldn’t stop eating them, and on the drive back to Colorado they stopped at any roadside stand that had the berries. LOL. Oh, to live somewhere where berries grow in such abundance!
Wonderful post, Pat! We had tons of blackberries on our tiny bit of former farm in Washington state–the berries were delicious for breakfast, and we picked them almost year-round. But they were the invasive, non-native kind–the canes could grow six feet a month, and pulled down sheds and garages if they weren’t controlled (like kudzu). One fall, I whacked back a whole area of blackberries next to our small house and the next spring was rewarded when a whole bank of daffodils and crocus popped up where I cleared away the tangle of blackberries!
This post took me back to my younger years in Northern Minnesota. We picked blueberries instead. My Dad would take us out to pick the berries. I remember the sounds of the woods and the birds. We would pick lots of blueberries, then take them to our grandparents. I still can remember how good the berries tasted when they were freshly picked. YUM…
I remember wild blackberries in Pennsylvania about 40 years ago when I was still young. They were so tart! not a pleasant experience. But years later in Oregon, oh my! Such flavor, some were sweet and some weren’t. Even my dog picked them off the lower vines. But they were intrusive too, to the side of my rose garden. I felt like a pioneer woman, decked in long sleeves, pants, tall socks, and gloves. I still got badly scratched removing beaucoup feet of vines that snaked to there and back. Later a friend hacked down a whole bunch of vines for me. I didn’t know that cut vines coming in contact with the earth would grow new vines. Hard lesson. I also remember my grandmother mixing a baking soda and water paste for bee stings. I found myself adding vinegar in recent years – don’t know where I got the idea. I see your grandmother mixed it that way too.
Great post, Pat. I don’t remember anything much growing wild when I was growing up in Ohio but many, many years ago, living in TX now, we had a small house by the lake. After a long trek down a slippery, shaley, cedar-covered slope, we would come to a small inlet off to the side of the dam some distance. There were rocks to jump into the water from and a small sandy beach, maybe all of eight feet wide. At the the side of that beach grew a whole mess of dewberries. I loved those berries. But, being TX, we worried about snakes under those sheltering leaves so I never quite got as many berries as I wanted. I think I’d be braver now, though. Sam
Ahhh, blackberries! How I love them. Our little hamlet in north Florida had miles and miles of nice, neat rows of pine trees, planted by the local paper mill…and in between all those tall, skinny, scraggly pines? Blackberries! I spent many a childhood hour picking berries with my mother or granny or even by myself. I’d come out scratched and itchy from the thorns and purple up to my elbows, but it was always worth it to come home with gallons of blackberries to bake into cobblers, eat with icecream, or make blackberry jam out of. I dragged my littlest sister off just a couple of years ago to spend the weekend blackberry picking and then teaching her how to make jam. We put up so many jars, I think I may still have a couple left! Mmmmmmm….yum!
Yummy. My mouth is watering over blackberries. My grandmother lived in Oak Cliff, south of Dallas. There were berry bushes at the back of her yard and in the alley.