Go blackberrying!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Yeah, blackberries can be an agressive weed, I know ! I sometimes wonder why the whole planet isn’t covered in them yet, given that they’re such agressive growers. It must be that they need a very fertile soil.

Mangetout, I had meant to point out the difference between dewberries and blackberries. Like you, I thought that maybe elbows is dealing with a dewberry (Rubus casius), or a dewberry hybrid, instead of a blackberry (Rubus fructus spec). The berries of a dewberry have a “frosted” appearance. Compared to blackberries they taste much more sour, even if they are ripe. Blackberries, dewberries and reaspberries are not totally different species, and can form hybrids. The best thing to do with such an unsatisfactory hybrid in your garden is probably to remove it and plant a storebought blackberryvariety with sweet berries and less thorns. Within three years, it will be just as gigantic a bush.

I assume everybody has heard the warning that no blackberries should be eaten uncooked, especially not blackberries that grow in areas populated by foxes, and especially not berries that grow close to the ground (say less then a metre?). There’s a slim chance they are infected with fox-tapeworm. With berries growing above your waist, or berries that are cooked, there is no danger.

Oh, and Ponder Stibbons, yup, we were stained all over. And we tasted good, too ! :wink:

22

I’ve got loads of huge blackberries in the back garden… but they’re almost over already. First crop came around the end of July - I must have a really early variety.

23

Yes, I hadn’t realized that for most people in the US, the blackberry season is already ending. Holland, when I live, is on the same latitude (I’m not sure that’s the right word, but you know what I mean) as Seattle.

24

Possibly; the whole Rubus family is a bit of a mess, taxonomically, since many of the ‘species’ are hugely variable and seem to hop in and out of various subspecies and variety classifications as fast as they are written down, plus interspecies crosses readily produce fertile progeny - Rubus could (in my rather unqualified opinion) be viewed as a family in which an evolutionary split is still very much underway.

Even ‘proper’ blackberries (Rubus Fruticosus Sspp) are quite various in plant and fruit form; some subspecies produce huge, robust arching stems with enormous rose-like thorns, others produce whippy, bristly stems, some produce compact, firm fruits, other produce large, irregular or squashy ones; some ripen unevenly and so on (and any imaginable combination of the above) My guess is that elbows is either dealing with a subspecies that just happens not to have a lot of fructose-per-prickle, or possibly that the plants themselves are merely past their fruiting prime or are not enjoying the local growing conditions.

I happen to like dewberries better than blackberries; they are harder to pick, as the fruit often crumbles into separate drupelets, but the flavour is more aromatic, in my opinion. Also the bushes tend to be lower growing and bristly rather than wickedly thorny.

25

I have learned a great deal and I am so happy to have someone else to ask about these things.

They are some form of wild blackberry I believe, I have done some research. I also have raspberries, and mullberries on the same property, but I’m not sure that has any bearing. They are of the above described, strong, long arching, roselike thorn variety. They produce robust, very black, not frosted berries.

With the little encouragement I have given them they have truly thrived. And I adore it, every few days, wander back to the stand and eat a few berries.

When we moved in and I set to taming the back yard, 3 yrs ago, there was a very large and old grapevine as well which I built an arbour for and which it completely covers, though I’ve yet to harvest any grapes. {harshed the first year during the yard reclamation, harshed the second year when the arbour was constructed,} This could well be the year but I doubt very much they are edible grapes.

My husband seeing that I love the blackberries so much suggested, taming the gapevine even more and letting the blackberries take over the arbour. I’m not really sure how that would work out. But it’s an idea with potential.

I had assumed that I would get better, with each season, at telling when the berries on the vine were ripe and sweet. But it doesn’t seem to be turning out that way.

My question, not so clear really, was it, is more about how to tell when they are ripe and likely to be sweet. They look to my eye just the same as the ones that are still bitter.

Patience is indeed a virtue, and I’ll admit not my strongest suit. But I’ve tried very hard this past season. I guess I was hoping for some sort of visual signal to tell the still bitter from the ripe. I believe that may be my real problem.

I know y’all have some secret knowledge you’re holding back. Come on spill it!

26

I have never heard of this. Everyone here just eats them off the bush (gotta get some reward while hacking them down!). Is this true worldwide?

27

I used to go blackberrying with my mom every summer. We’d dress up in as much denim as possible (not that it was ever enough), try to reach for or jump for that cluster of juicy berries just our of reach without falling, and get purple stain everything.

I haven’t had a chance to go picking for a while, since in this area all the bushes are being torn up or sprayed with herbacides (and also I have no time), and when we go up to Washington on vacation, the berries are either not ripe or all gone. Still, I have enough experience with the damn things to bring you: how to tell a ripe blackberry. 1. Is it soft? The softer a berry is, the riper it will be. 2. How easily does it come away from the vine? Usually, the really ripe ones will practically fall off in your hand. 3. If you’re looking for a really sweet berry, go for the ones that are kind of glazed over and not so shiny anymore.

28

You sure stirred up some wonderful memories! I remember going to pick dewberries with my brother when we were 6 or 7. We would be stained purple all over! :slight_smile: Mom would love it when we would bring a coffee can full home to her. She would make homemade dewberry cobbler for dessert that night. Mmm…

Maybe I’ll look for some dewberry bushes soon, and make some “memorial” cobbler.

29

1 big glass
2 scoops french vanilla ice cream
pour in one can of ginger ale
top with a fistfull of squished blackberries

bliss.

30

It sure is. Have you ever seen pictures of the Rose Arbor in the White Garden in Sissinghurst, Kent, England?
It’s an wrought-iron arbor where roses have been led over the iron and fastened, so that they form a kind of transparent latticework. I’ve seen it, it looks absolutely stunning both from a distance, and when youré in it looking up through the latticework of branches. If it works with roses it might work with blackberries too. You could pick them from the inside out!
Lot of upkeep, though.

31

On picking blackberries; each fruit typically goes through a number of distinct phases (at any one moment, there will be fruit at all stages on the bush);

  • Green (obviously not ripe)
  • Red (Still not ripe, but we once told our children that you had to suck the red ones until they dissolved, which resulted in a completely silent drive home).
  • Black, but still firm and still the same size as the red ones - still not ripe - these will be sour and when cooked, they will remain hard and turn red.
  • Black, glossy, conspicuously larger than the red ones (pick me now!)
  • Black, dull, very large and soft - over ripe - these will be really sweet and you might still get away with picking them, but they are more likely to suffer in transit (or just squish in your fingers); they are also more likely to contain insect larvae.

I’m obsessive about blackberries and I inspect every fruit carefully as I pick it (sounds time consuming, but you sort of get into a routine) - the most important thing to look at is the scar where the stalk was attached - this should be very pale green in colour and there shouldn’t be a bunch of little withered drupelets around the stalk scar - if this isn’t the case, there’s probably a maggot inside.

32

I was sure this was like geocaching, but different.

33

I used to go blackberrying with a friend on mine who lived on a farm. It was fun to get out and walk around in the woods. We would inevitable come face to face with wild creatures, like big scary white tailed deer. :slight_smile: But the payoff was the best, the next day would sit in his big screened-in front porch and gorge ourselves on just-out-of-the-oven grandma’s homemade blackberry pie. :: drool ::

34

Ooooh I love blackberries! Unfortunately I can no longer eat the wild ones. When I was younger I was picking blackberries, and I was thisclose to putting one in my mouth that had a big SPIDER on it! Now wild blackberries bring back that awful memory for me :rolleyes:. Sad but true. But I hope everyone else has a great time picking blackberries and making jam, I’m jealous!

36

I’ve picked black raspberries (also called blackcaps) in ditches and wooded areas of SW Wisconsin, but I don’t think blackberries grow there.

Blackcaps are good, though. Their season is more mid-summer.

37

R.K Usherlake, racial slurs will not be tolerated on the SDMB.

Do not do this again.

Cajun Man
for the SDMB

38

Ditto.

39

Raz, you know what they say: “when you fall of your horse, get back on immediately, or else you’ll never dare to go horsebackriding again”. :wink:

LilyoftheValley, yes, it’s true, sadly. It’s best to only eat uncooked berries that grew above your waist. This is one of those health warnings I was sorry to hear about, too.

And Cajun Man, thanks.

40

Oh, I almost forgot; if you’re picking blackberries with the intention of eating them fresh the same day, don’t put them in the fridge; chilling them makes them taste watery and insipid (also, leaving them at room temperature allows any crawling insects to escape before you munch them). And raspberries - it is a grievous sin to eat chilled raspberries, or to wash them.