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It's blackberry time
July is blackberry time in the Ozarks. The plants are widespread at Roundrock, getting started just about anywhere enuf sunlight reaches the ground. Long-time readers will recall that the area where we are now growing a stand of pines we once called Blackberry Corner because, well, it was full of blackberries. (It was also the northwest corner of our property — and still is.)
I don’t normally eat the blackberries we have in our woods. I’m not sure why. I think I’m afraid of picking up some intestinal pestilence or such. Yet as a boy, in those idyllic summers spent in rural Kentucky, we used to wade into the tall grass and thorny canes and pick buckets of them at high season. My sainted grandmother would then make cobblers out of our loot. I seemed to have survived those days more or less intact.
And it happens that on our last trip to Roundrock, Libby and I did sample the blackberries. You can see that they are not the robust, finely shaped variety you find in the store. But they looked ripe enuf to try, so we did.
Sadly, they were mostly disappointing. They weren’t very flavorful, and they had large seeds within (larger than normal it seemed), which is Libby’s big objection to this fruit.
So I don’t think the deer and raccoons and quail and bears (?) have anything to fear about those two humans eating up their blackberry stores.
Missouri calendar: