Feeling so loved right now. My oldest daughter just dropped off these strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries to me. They look so fresh and are so cool for eating during these hot summer days. I also have some red grapes that she brought me yesterday. Now that school is out she told me she will have more time to spoil me. She certainly surprised me today. What's your favorite berry? It looks like it's going to be a good season for them.
My favorite is the blackberry, but I love strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, currants, and maybe any other ones that i forgot to mention. When I lived in western Washington State, the blackberries grew wild everywhere, and they got so much rain that they just grew to be huge berries, around the size of the end joint of my thumb. Every year, I looked forward to blackberry season, and picked them just about every day while they were ripe. When I was growing up, my mother grew raspberries and blackberries, as well as a lot of other fruit (plums, grapes, apples, pears, and apricots), so we always had fruit of some kind in the summer. She bought strawberries and peaches from the farmers fruit stands, so we had those in the summer, too. So far, the berries that I have planted here in Alabama grow just fine, but the birds and squirrels eat all of the fruit that we get, which is frustrating !
I love all berries. Raspberries taste good, but they seem to be so fragile...they go "structureless" in a short period of time. For that reason I gotta go with blackberries as my favorite. Bite-sized, flavorful, and they keep their plumpness. And they look like little bunches of grapes. I have berries on my cereal most every morning. Good stuff.
How sweet of your daughter, Babs. My favorite berries are blueberries, then strawberries. My husband loves blackberries.
I like blueberries and blackberries but not many things on this Earth is as good as a fresh vine ripened strawberry.
This year my blackberry bushes all went crazy, and have taken over that whole section of the yard by the side fence. I am seeing a whole lot of green berries, so maybe we can actually eat some this year before the critters get them all like last year. I have been watching youtube videos on propagating blackberries, so I cut a couple of the longest ones back to a more manageable size, and made starts from the ones I cut. They should start producing roots within a few weeks if all goes like it is supposed to do, and then I can start them along the back fence by this fall when they are well-rooted. I am also starting some fig cuttings, and if anything looks like this is working, then I will try it with some of the raspberries and jostaberries. Here is my blackberry patch.
Evonne if blackberries are your fav, you'd be very happy here in a couple weeks. This year the bushes are loaded, now if we can just keep the birds off them. Guess bird netting is in order.
I am starting to get some large blackberries on my vines. They are still green, but should be the extra large ones once they get ripe. Bobby has some of those sprayers that hook to the garden hose and are triggered by movement to spray for a minute or two. We are going to hook one up facing the blackberry patch and see if that will keep the birds and squirrels scared out while our berries ripen. The little kiddie pool with the strawberries is right near there also, so maybe it will keep the birds from eating all of the strawberries the second they show any color. You can see how large they are compared to the leaves, and one is starting to turn color now, too !
We are too ,and same thing with birds of course. Squirrels not so much they fear the dogs now, So seldom see them anymore.
Now that we are starting to feel a little more like fall than the hot summer heat we had this summer, I have decided that it is time to start pruning the blackberries. They have spread so much, and just grew crazy wild this year, and so thick that it was hard to even get in and pick all of the berries; so what i have decided is that I am going to have to prune them right down to the base and then get them trained better when they come back up next spring. I have been watching some of the videos from people who grow a lot of blackberries and they have them trained more like grapevines than just looking so spread all over like mine are. This is going to mean that I have to cut off all of the vines that would be producing next year, so I will get very few berries probably (if any); but that is the only way that I can get them pruned back enough to contain the bushes properly. I started at one end this afternoon, and will just work my way down to the other end, pruning as I go. I am already finding some new starts, so I will dig up some of those and start another blackberry patch out along the back fence line, where i can trellis it along the fence. I can see that it is going to take me a while to work my way through this, but that is fine, too. I can just work on it a little each day until I get it finished. The sassafras’s and the bamboo are in the same part of our yard, so they have tried to spread into the blackberry area, and everything is just piled on top of each other in there. I will have to get all of it out, but at least the blackberries are the only thing that is thorny. My gardening gloves are no match for the blackberry thorns; so i am going to borrow a pair of Bobby’s heavy leather gloves for the job.