My family loves blackberries, and we definitely consider them one of the great early treats of summer. A few years ago we converted my daughter's pitching/batting cage into a blackberry patch. We just tilled the field sand into our lovely clay soil, and then added lots of manure to further amend the soil. We then started planting various seedless blackberry plants (i.e. Navaho, Arapaho, and Ouachita). I have about 12 nice plants now. Our love for blackberries is also shared by birds. They can spot ripe berries with ease and will eat them with reckless abandon. I understand why they do this, but last weekend we started a project to protect the berries so we can enjoy more of our harvest.
We still need to add protective netting, but you can see pics of the framework below and get an idea of what we've been up to -- mostly a lot of manual labor......
I'm looking forward to picking berries with my grandkids like I did with my great grandmother, Granny Alma, as a child. We would pick berries (that had thorns) out of her patch. We would eat a few while picking and then bring the others in to be rinsed off. Then she would drizzle really cold cream over them and add a little raw sugar over the top. It was a great treat on a hot day. When the summer temperatures faded into fall and winter, she would take a bag of frozen berries out of her freezer and make wonderful cobblers for us to enjoy!
My husband, sons, and Jeremy were very helpful with this project. I hope we have a great harvest, so I can reward them with fresh berries in cream, a yummy cobbler, or whatever sounds good to us!
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| Poles set just before the sun went down last Sunday. |
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| Framework in place as the sun set on another Sunday. |
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| Another view - the netting will be added soon. |
