Our family went blackberry picking the other day. This is something we generally try to do at least once every autumn. Wild blackberries ('brambles' here in Scotland), raspberries, blueberries, and crab apples grow in the nearby countryside, and being the sort of people who delight in getting something for nothing, we love going out with empty plastic containers and coming home laden with several pounds of fruit.
The blueberries are the first to come out in early summer. You have to stoop to pick them and you need a subtle touch or the berries easily crush in your hand. It takes forever to collect a few pounds, but the forest where we go to pick is cool and shady and for all that your back gets a little sore, it is always worth it as the berries are tiny and intensely flavorful -- far better than anything you can find in a store. I make blueberry muffins with them, or blueberry sauce to pour over ice cream.
Raspberries are next out, in mid July. There aren't as many of these as there are blackberries, and they are so good that it is hard to resist eating them as you pick. What few we manage to bring home, we tend to put in our cereal or eat immediately.
Blackberries come out just after the raspberries, and they are everywhere. If you put your mind to it, you could easily pick a kilogram a day and leave enough for the neighbors. We've earmarked the best bramble-picking spots over the past years we've lived here: the bridle path near our old neighborhood, a certain trail in the woods, just up the road from us, along both sides of a narrow country lane. We know where there is a hidden gulley between the bushes and the side of the road (infuriatingly, the out-of-reach berries there are inevitably the biggest and most tantalizing), we are aware of the places where the nettles grow almost as high as the berries, and we know to visit the deserted farmhouse where there used to be golden raspberries that ripened just before the brambles.
So yesterday, tired but satisfied, we returned to our house with several pounds of berries. And as we were coming down the side road, there, just outside our very own garden fence, we spotted several canes absolutely groaning with the biggest, fattest brambles you have ever seen. They were so ripe and ready-to-pick that they almost jumped into our eager hands. I filled the last container with these and baked them into a huge bramble-and-apple crumble.
We couldn't get over it: we'd been all over the place, along hedgerows, through fields, down paths, up and over creeks, in pursuit of the likeliest berries and there, right next to our house, were the very biggest and best we had seen. We've walked past those brambles dozens of times and never registered that they were there.
There has to be a lesson in that. If there are any hidden crab apple trees nearby that have heretofore escaped my attention, believe me -- I'll find them.
