The invasive species was introduced in 1885 by noted botanist Luther Burbank. People seem to be of two minds about them. Many love that they can go out and pick tasty fruit for free instead of paying exorbitant supermarket prices. Others complain that the hard-to-kill plants take over their yards. Me? I don’t like the ones that send their spiky vines where I want to walk. I don’t really eat the berries. But half the back yard is unusable anyway, being a slope that goes down to a little creek, so mostly they don’t bother me.
I picked about 50 or 60 berries Friday, from the bush that is growing along the property line. Still haven’t decided what I’ll do with them.
They are natures finest free bounty. At the end of our road there is a stretch of roughly 100 yards of hedgerow jam-packed (ha!) with those little nuggets of dark deliciousness.
They’ll be ripening in late August and the correct thing to do is to pop them in a crumble with bramley apples.
I love blackberries but I’m happy to get then from the woods or meadow than to have then growing across my suburban backyard. Besides, blackberry picking tasks me back to my youth where they probably made up 70% of my summer diet as a kid.
I’ve got zillions of wild blackberries here in North Georgia, but I also have some hybrids (Arapahoe) that I planted in my yard. This year was amazing for the hybrids and I tried to make seedless jam with mediocre success. I’ll try again next year, but blackberry wine sounds very worthy to me…especially if the wine is strong.
Blackberries, either wild or hybrid, are my favorite fruit.
Grew up in a large yard in which the original owner had planted blackberries about 20+ years previously. I’m in the middle; if I had to trade the experiences of gorging on almost-overripe berries or sitting in a tree gorging on almost-overripe cherries, I think I’d trade my legs instead.
OTOH, the gahdamned vines took over another half acre every time you turned your back, and did things like send runners out into the grass, where walking through or mowing would make them tangle around your leg. I’ll take sharkbite, thanks. Every year or two we’d attack them with the heaviest gardening gear and beat them back behind the fences and into shrubs. Every late summer they were sprawling again. My mother actually managed to kill most of the ones in the middle of the yard by relentless chopping, digging and rotenone.
The owner also planted decorative bamboo, but I’m not going there. Ever had a lush lawn full of punji stakes?
ETA: As for eating, I prefer boysenberries above all other choices, but wouldn’t you know that’s one fruit that Nwingland and its dour denizens have never heard of. I have to mail-order plain old Smuckers jam.
I prefer the blackberry’s beautiful and tasty hybrid sister, the Marionberry, but they don’t grow in wild profusion like blackberries do. I seem to recall that there are three varieties of them. There are huge brambles all over the PNW (and in our neighborhood). I used to take my kids to pick them when I lived on Whidbey Island.
We just moved from central Illinois to the PacNW (like, we arrived three days ago). We have decided to call our house The Brambles. In Illinois only honeysuckle grew with such wild, sprawling abandon. We are new enough to this to be delighted by the blackberries, but we’re shocked by how thick some of the runners get.
I thought it was cool you can pull over just about anywhere and pick as many blackberries as you want. FWIW, I was at the market this morning, and they were selling farm-raised blackberries for $3.50 for a six-ounce container. That’s $9.33/pound! :eek:
I’m fortunate in that the brambles have not taken over the yard. At least not the part of the yard that’s usable.
Wash your blackberries, making sure you get rid of any animal life clinging to them, having picked them over and thrown out any mouldy ones - it does no harm at all if they are slightly over-ripe. It also does no harm if they are frozen and thawed. Put three pounds of blackberries into a white or clear plastic fermenting bin or bucket - you need a lid for this. Boil two pints of water, pour over the blackberries, mash with a stainless steel or plastic masher, allow to cool to blood heat and add wine yeast (see its own packet for instructions, e.g. whether you have to make up a starter). Cover loosely and allow to ferment for three days, stirring night and morning to break up the “raft” of berries.
Strain or siphon off the liquor into a clean fermenting jar. Boil about another three pints of water and dissolve a two-pound bag of sugar in it having removed the water from the heat, allow to cool to blood heat (or you will kill the yeast), add to the liquor in the jar and make up to the full gallon with boiled water which, again, you have allowed to cool…
Now siphon off about a quart into a couple of wine bottles which you plug with cotton wool, because when the yeast really gets going on the sugar you will get massive amounts of pink foam which is likely to spew out of your fermentation trap unless you have allowed plenty of head space. Even then, consider keeping the brew a few degrees below ideal fermentation temperature to discourage the ferment from getting too carried away too soon. When it calms down, after a week or so, put the spare liquor back with the bulk.
Keep it jogging along, out of the sunlight (you don’t want to spoil the colour or the flavour) and watch as the ferment settles down to a steady stream of bubbles. When this gets close to stopping, siphon the liquor off the sediment into a fresh jar and feed it another quarter pound of sugar dissolved in water. Assuming it ferments all this out in another week or two, repeat a couple of times more. Eventually the alcohol content will rise high enough that the yeast is dying off despite the addition of sugar, and at this point you’re about done.
Consult your local winemaking shop for products that will make good and sure the yeast is dead as you don’t really want it throwing a sediment in the bottle and you certainly don’t want it blowing the corks or bursting the bottles. Allow to mature for a few months if you have the self control.
If your winemaking shop wants to sell you a small can of red grape juice concentrate, you may find that your wine yeast is duly appreciative of the extra trace elements and the grape adds a little extra body, but pure blackberry should be flavoursome all by itself. That said, if you have access to elderberries as well then an ounce or two to the pound of blackberries will sharpen up the edge without coarsening it too much.
Anything concerning suitable fermentation vessels, traps, siphons, sterilising chemicals and so on is left as an exercise for the student, and you’ll need to research it. In a nutshell, everything needs to be spotlessly clean, you should avoid contact with anything except clear plastic, glass or stainless steel (and as little as possible of the last of these), and don’t leave your wine sitting on dead yeast or you’ll be just as sorry as I was after I ruined two whole gallons of it.
I have them in my yard. When I moved in they were behind the grapes. I built a stone raised bed garden and tried to grow veggies with no success, as there were many over large mulberry trees overhanging half the yard. So I gave up and transplanted the blackberries, they’re easy and I like to eat them.
A couple of years later the house next door changed hands and the new owner took down the mulberries. The blackberries took off. Have already picked probably 8-10 pints, this year, and the season is not yet over.
As they are in an 3’ raised bed it’s not too difficult to keep them confined. I put a wire structure in the centre to tie the ends to, worked quite well. They are low maintenance, easy to grow, produce berries over several weeks and are yummy!
I just moved back to the PNW. I missed the wild blackberries.
I was thinking about starting a thread, actually. For 11+ months out of the year, stickery bushes are a nefarious wall of vicious thorns. Thus they were the bane of my childhood, an otherwise free-roaming affair in suburban woods.
Then, for a couple weeks in summer, the damned plants decide to apologize. “Sorry for being nefarious walls of vicious thorns. Here, have some delicious fruit!” And they are forgiven… for a month.
But, damn, I love me some blackberries. I’ma gonna make a pie this year.
One question, what’s the biology behind that one berry on the end of the stalk getting ripe so much earlier than the rest?
A lot of plants have a “terminal bud” that’s dominant over the others. The best example I can think of is artichokes, which typically have one huge flower/bud at the top and several smaller ones from the lower branches.
