"Either you've been picking blackberries or voting in Afghanistan.
-words spoken by a neighbor after seeing my hands.
Front
august
system
frost
Blast
isolated
late summer
thursday
elevation
polar air
These are words that were spoken this morning, in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow. Words that should not be spoken in August, not now, when the berries are ripening. This post was supposed to be about tickling blackberries, and warm sunshine and waiting until they were just at the perfect stage of sweetness. Errrmmm…. I may have to tickle them a little harder this morning. Something I never do. A blackberry is a delight, honey sweet and bursting with juice when it is ripe. Black berries are not necessarily ripe. Red ones are not even close. A berry needs to be so full of juice that you risk having it explode in your fingers. I hold my hands under the berries I'm picking, letting them fall into my palm as I very gently tickle them. If they don't fall, they aren't ready. Most ripe berries have others equally ripe next to them. Tickle softly or the others will fall. It's no fun to kneel down to retrieve them in a thorny patch of canes. When you lose them, they're gone.
Comments
7 responses to “tickling blackberries”
It’s one of the few solo things I was allowed to do with my pony as a kid. My gram would strap a couple of baskets to him and he and I would walk up the wood trails to large banks of blackberry bushes. He was pretty adept at pulling berries without getting his lips pricked, but I think we probably ate more than we came home with.
Hope you are able to tickle enough of them off the canes before the cold arrests further ripening. It seems a crime to see so many unripe berries. It certainly has been a weird summer. I’m not ready for it to end. at. all. But then again I never really am.
Evocative description..I can see it, feel like I’m tickling berries.
burrr!
The berries need a blanket over them tonight!
(and you might want a nip of blackberry brandy!)
Oh dear! We are in the middle of a heatwave with temps approaching 100 – wish I could send you 15 degrees right now!
We’ll be scurrying around our garden tonight with sheets, and keeping our fingers crossed.
I’ve got the Summer of ’09 written down as the Worst Summer Ever…
you are so lucky, our blackberries we dry and bitter this year. what a bummer. I always make blackberry jam. enjoy