Color me purple!

For the Schoolhouse farmers and farmers in training one of summer’s biggest delights is blackberry season. Blackberries one of Mother Nature’s power fruits, grows wild around virtually ever farm field in our area. We have a couple different wild varieties some that come on earlier and those that wait a little longer. We harvest the early varieties and process them into jam amidst the processing of Black currants and then if time allows before the beans and tomatoes hit we move onto the later varieties.

Harvesting blackberries is rather fun because you get to chomp the purple beauties as you harvest them for later use. The eating portion of the harvest leads to reduce harvest and consequently greater time spend to obtain the required quantity for processing. This is fine if you have all day or don’t mind spending all day in the brambles, but our children don’t have that much of an attention span. So they collectively developed an ingeniously simple method to prevent the ingesting portion. They arm themselves with pieces of chewing gum to keep the taste buds distracted. This method actually works pretty well and they get a reasonable harvest completed in a relatively short period.

Periodically during blackberry season guests arrive on the farm during picking parties and if they bring kids they usually are send off to seek out our children. Our children will be found in the field perimeter harvesting and the friends attempt to lend a hand. However not armed with gum they start sampling berries the picking for them becomes totally for personal consumption. Meanwhile our kids have filled the daily quota and head in, hot and sweaty and ready for a swim or something less taxing. The friends meanwhile remain rooted to the berry patch happily stuffing in the purple gobs of summer goodness.

The fearless purple gobblers usually continue feasting until called by their parent’s siblings or a chorus of people from a far as it is time to go. Minutes later or considerably longer they show up sheepishly to rejoin their clan and they are asked the usual question, “What have you been up to?” The response starts generally with slight stammering and a wide purple stained grin followed by “nothing, why?” Yet another berry enthusiast busted by the color purple.

Richard Malcom
The Schoolhouse Farmer