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09/08/2009: "The Yin and Yang of Blackberries"

Blackberries. Love 'em or hate 'em. Or more accurately, love 'em and hate 'em. The sweetness of the fruit, the prickle of the thorns. They bear the fragrant blossom for the honeybee, but they also take over land, and even pull down buildings. I once watched a blackberry patch cover and seemingly demolish a small shed along my walking route to work. It was a slow, inexorable process; I'm sure that the canes themselves didn't actually pull it down, but they may have clogged gutters and directed water into places that eventually destroyed the structure.

Down at the farm we have both the yin and yang of the berries. I think that Lou and his family have picked something like 16 gallons of berries for jam, jelly, and wine; I know that he helped me pick a five gallon bucket last week so I could try my hand at making wine. Note that the lovely model in this picture is merely expressing her joy and amazement over the size of the harvest, not celebrating her participation in the harvest (despite what you might think from the bucket hanging from her neck).



It's been a good season for the berries themselves. We've had ample heat, ample sunshine, and intermittent rain. The berries are as large as I've ever seen them, and they just keep coming. We're into the third week of picking, and there are still green berries down at the farm. Check out the size of these monsters:



And then there is a the dark side. I didn't get the pasture mowed this spring due to the pressing concerns of other projects (one of which was getting the mower sharpened). The pasture mostly looks after itself, however; grass is a pretty stiff competitor for many weeds. The three notable exceptions are tansy ragwort, canada thistle, and, you guessed it, himalayan blackberries. I spent a bit of time in mid summer pulling tansy one day, just to take a break from wheat threshing. There actually wasn't much tansy out there, which is why I could take a break from the wheat and feel like I was making a difference with the tansy. The canada thistle got a free pass, and went to seed unchecked. But I've dug in and decided to take on the blackberries here in September. Right now they should be vulnerable: they've put a lot of energy into berry production, so mowing them before they can send much into their roots for next season should put some hurt on them.

Here's the view from the tractor, plunging into a large patch of blackberry. I gotta say, that's one advantage of the bush mower and big tractor over the walk-behind: you're mostly impervious to the canes and their thorns while you're mowing. The sickle bar mower cuts them off at the ground, but then you're left to dodge 'em as the machine continues forward progress and the thorny canes land in your lap. I had put the forks on the bucket of the tractor to help tear out the canes; my friend Dorothy said that the forks also help keep hidden fencing from getting tangled up in your mower.





One final story on the blackberries: I had picked two quarts of prime berries yesterday, and I set them on the garden tractor in the shed out of the sun while I went out to bush hog the pasture. Coming back for some gear oil I noticed that the berries were gone. Children in the vicinity were questioned repeatedly: what happened to my berries? All professed innocence. After walking all over the property getting pretty hot under the collar, I finally talked to Lou's wife and learned that it was the little girls who had unexpectedly shown up with an improbably large number of berries that they wished to have made into cobbler. Armed with this information I cornered the chief culprit and gave her one last chance to come clean. She stuck to her story. She was then informed that she was ineligible for cobbler. After this her sister cracked, and the whole story came out. The girls were sent out to pick replacement berries, and no one got cobbler. Crime and punishment. Yin and yang.