Blackberry Season

The blackberries in our backyard are beginning to ripen, a sign that this could be a good day for roaming the backroads of Chatham County in search of the "mother lode" of blackberries. We have our favorite places to go ... which shall remain unnamed ... but believe me, it's not difficult to fill your bucket with berries around here! Rouse the Spouse and I make an annual trip into the wilds of Chatham to collect berries for eating now and later. We declared today the day, and we were not disappointed!

Picking berries is a hot, sweaty, thorny job. It requires protective clothing and extra bug barriers. Today I wore a long-sleeved chambray shirt, long pants, rubber boots, and bug spray. I forgot my sun hat. I don't like to pick with sun glasses. I can't see into the thicket well enough. And I haven't figured out how to pick berries with gloves on, so my hands always get torn up. It's a good idea to take a bottle of water. Even on a cloudy day it gets really hot in the briar patch.

The payoff is that intensely delicious berry yumminess on your tongue! Whether out-of-hand, topping a dollop of yogurt at breakfast, stirred into a bowl of ice cream, tossed into the pancake or muffin batter, baked into a cobbler, or cooked into a jar of jam, it's hard to think of anything as delicious - as representative of summer - as the blackberry.

I went to work this afternoon to save these blackberries for a later date. We love blackberry jam! Two batches of jam is a minimal annual requirement at this house. Those two batches are jarred and ready for the pantry.

I wonder how many people will enjoy the fruit of today's labor in the coming year. Leave a comment if you've ever eaten my blackberry jam!

2013 - A good year for plump blackberries!

Processing berries using a food mill. I like to get some - but not all - of the seeds out.

Making jam is a juicy mess and a hot job, but it's worth it!