Blackberries

One of the neat things we have here in our town are wild blackberry bushes. The bushes are huge and offer bounteous berries to all who are brave enough to pick them. Why is bravery required? Because wild blackberry bushes are extremely thorny and will almost certainly draw blood no matter how careful you are (believe me, I have the scratches to prove it!). A couple of days ago my friend Angie invited us over to her house to pick berries and make blackberry jam. Angie is the same friend who invited me to "do corn" with her a couple weeks ago. She does things the old-fashioned way and makes so much of their food from scratch. Here she is with a two of her six children. And this is our friend Kelly who grew up on farms and also does things from scratch. You can probably see she has a daring streak in her.
Lauren was a great little berry picker. She loves to work and hung around to help even though all the other kids had run off to play.
After a couple of hours of picking we had a couple of buckets full of berries. Do you know what you would pay for those in the store ??? We then turned them into jam which is definitely a task best done with a team. After splitting the "fruits of our labor" I went home with twelve containers of blackberry jam. Yummyyyy!