On Tuesday, July 15, 2014 3:03:47 PM UTC-4, Terry Coombs wrote:
Another gallon of blackberries in the freezer , and I only lost a couple

ounces of blood and gained a handful of chigger bites ... What I expected to

be an hour and 3 pints or so turned into 3.5 hours well , I actually stood

in the road talking to the new neighbors for about 3/4 hour and over a

gallon of berries . I waited 3 days this time to pick , which it turns out

is a mistake . Too many over-ripe berries , pluck one and another falls too

. And I sure ain't diggin' around in the weeds for a few berries , there's

bugs and snakes and stuff down there ! So from now until they're gone it'll

be every other day . And of course I'm not picking it all , the birds and

other small critters get their share . After all , they're the ones

responsible for us having the plants all over .

Speaking of all over , I noticed today that we have new canes growing in

areas that were bush hogged year-before-last by the utility company in their

easement for power poles , they keep the trees 30 feet away from the lines

so next year there'll be more places to pick . This year has been a banner

year for wild fruit , we've had just about the right mix of rainy and sunny

days . The blackberry patches are still covered up with unripened fruit . I

expect to harvest at a minimum another 4-6 gallons over the next few weeks .

And if all the muscadines on the vines make it to maturity , we'll be havin'

all kinds of fun makin' wine , jelly , and my wife has a great juice recipe

. I may have to buy another freezer for what we won't have time to

process/room to store !

--

Snag

I guess tending wild fruit patches

counts as gardening ...

Where are you located? We had almost no berries in our area last year, Maryland north of Baltimore, but there were a lot of unripened ones on the bushes last weekend. I hope we get enough this year to make jelly, wine, or both.

Paul