When I was a kid, we moved way out into the country, with a man made lake kinda smack in the middle of the property (we weren’t well off, my parents were just boomers with no sense of money).
On the other side of the lake was about 3 acres of blackberry brambles and literally nothing else.
My mother… decided we kids needed to harvest it every single year for jelly, because she wasn’t about to do it and get mangled… we were required to get 5 gallons each every month they grew.
And now if I never see another blackberry, it’ll be too soon. None of us even really liked blackberry that much… she gave most of the jelly away.
I think they’re delicious when they’re ripe, but I’ll only harvest the easiest, safest ones around the edge of the bush. That job you and your siblings did sounds hella painful. The thorns will sometimes snag me when I’m hiking and it’s like peeling a layer of needles off my skin when removing the vine.
That property sounds like a wonderful place to grow up though. Lots of land to explore, and a lake to swim in? Yes please!
Edit:this turned out longer than I thought - my bad.
I loved it there. I grew up more urban when I was small, and when I was like 9 we moved to that place, 48 acres 5 miles from town, 7 acre man-made lake, 10 acres marshland, 3 acres brambles, and the rest mostly woods. Rural LCOL area sort of thing.
[For the record, by the time I was 20, my parents were broke and in serious 5-figure debt. I inherited nothing but eBay-procured-junk which netted me about 5k after a ton of work to sell it, so this is absolutely not a flex. At all.]
It was awesome for someone with audhd; gave me stuff to do solo, and helped me build a love for nature and harmony, and I’m a pro-nature science gal now (by interest and training!) We had horses (my mom’s thing. That’s why I got lessons as well) and I’d just mount my horse, Hayward (the boy loved to eat. Very fitting name) with no gear, and we’d bounce around the trails as fast as he wanted to go 3-12 times every few days. Risky as hell, as I was not geared up either! Usually barefoot, no helmet, whatever. (Live fast die young… and I almost did! But now I’m almost 40, so…). My mom called us “fast and faster” because I also ran everywhere at top speed (I’d have probably been a great sprinter if I didn’t have to wear shoes or run on a boring track… I’d sprint down the gravel driveway leaping from grass patch to grass patch to protect my feet a bit, because feeding the horses was my job and I didn’t want it to take a lot of time from my day. Supposedly my form was naturally fantastic, but I hate running…), and we were good for each other (he was a retired lesson horse with a lot of spunk in his old age)… I had four “campsites” I built out of wild sumac I downed, each with a survival kit for me and Hayward, I used to accompany a snapper trapper (he trapped snapping turtles and we had hundreds… it was a good system) setting, baiting, and harvesting traps, lots of things to learn about and “manage” (like the pond -technical designation due to being man made, even tho it was 7 acres and spring fed- often flooded, so the pasture would have tons of minnows to catch and relocate)
We really didn’t swim in that lake… the bottom was all muck where we launched the canoe, and it grew gobs of weeds that would tangle you if you weren’t careful everywhere else. You could almost walk across the weeds when the water got low, they were so dense. Plus snapping turtles galore. But it was some 25 feet deep near the drainage dam, so the fish anlmost never froze out. Ice skating happened tho!
Blackberries are the one thing from my time there that I do not look upon fondly. Harvesting always required wearing clothing I couldn’t stand to have on, to protect me from a plant I wanted nothing to do with… it was just not a good experience, and so I’m a bit tainted on blackberries now. They taste fine, but I don’t want them. My parents would mow a corridor through the brambles and we’d just sort of do our best… but yeah hitting that quota suuuucked.
Brambleberries aren’t something to throw kids at as a requirement, so good on you for “this is where they come from but it sucks” sort of mentality. As long as they know this delicious thing is waiting for them if they take a risk, that risk is all but taken.
If I could have eaten 2/3of the berries I collected, I’d probably like them. But being set to a quota made them undesirable.
Hey good to hear the need for speed worked out for you! I bucked authority by being a girl wrestler back when that was pretty rare in the US (still is, but less; this was around 2k), and I’m still all about challenging authority so that worked poorly for me overall ;) it probably hit a lot of the same dopamine/endorphin systems as running. So that’s great :) (genuinely!)
When I was a kid, we moved way out into the country, with a man made lake kinda smack in the middle of the property (we weren’t well off, my parents were just boomers with no sense of money).
On the other side of the lake was about 3 acres of blackberry brambles and literally nothing else.
My mother… decided we kids needed to harvest it every single year for jelly, because she wasn’t about to do it and get mangled… we were required to get 5 gallons each every month they grew.
And now if I never see another blackberry, it’ll be too soon. None of us even really liked blackberry that much… she gave most of the jelly away.
I think they’re delicious when they’re ripe, but I’ll only harvest the easiest, safest ones around the edge of the bush. That job you and your siblings did sounds hella painful. The thorns will sometimes snag me when I’m hiking and it’s like peeling a layer of needles off my skin when removing the vine.
That property sounds like a wonderful place to grow up though. Lots of land to explore, and a lake to swim in? Yes please!
Edit:this turned out longer than I thought - my bad.
I loved it there. I grew up more urban when I was small, and when I was like 9 we moved to that place, 48 acres 5 miles from town, 7 acre man-made lake, 10 acres marshland, 3 acres brambles, and the rest mostly woods. Rural LCOL area sort of thing.
[For the record, by the time I was 20, my parents were broke and in serious 5-figure debt. I inherited nothing but eBay-procured-junk which netted me about 5k after a ton of work to sell it, so this is absolutely not a flex. At all.]
It was awesome for someone with audhd; gave me stuff to do solo, and helped me build a love for nature and harmony, and I’m a pro-nature science gal now (by interest and training!) We had horses (my mom’s thing. That’s why I got lessons as well) and I’d just mount my horse, Hayward (the boy loved to eat. Very fitting name) with no gear, and we’d bounce around the trails as fast as he wanted to go 3-12 times every few days. Risky as hell, as I was not geared up either! Usually barefoot, no helmet, whatever. (Live fast die young… and I almost did! But now I’m almost 40, so…). My mom called us “fast and faster” because I also ran everywhere at top speed (I’d have probably been a great sprinter if I didn’t have to wear shoes or run on a boring track… I’d sprint down the gravel driveway leaping from grass patch to grass patch to protect my feet a bit, because feeding the horses was my job and I didn’t want it to take a lot of time from my day. Supposedly my form was naturally fantastic, but I hate running…), and we were good for each other (he was a retired lesson horse with a lot of spunk in his old age)… I had four “campsites” I built out of wild sumac I downed, each with a survival kit for me and Hayward, I used to accompany a snapper trapper (he trapped snapping turtles and we had hundreds… it was a good system) setting, baiting, and harvesting traps, lots of things to learn about and “manage” (like the pond -technical designation due to being man made, even tho it was 7 acres and spring fed- often flooded, so the pasture would have tons of minnows to catch and relocate)
We really didn’t swim in that lake… the bottom was all muck where we launched the canoe, and it grew gobs of weeds that would tangle you if you weren’t careful everywhere else. You could almost walk across the weeds when the water got low, they were so dense. Plus snapping turtles galore. But it was some 25 feet deep near the drainage dam, so the fish anlmost never froze out. Ice skating happened tho!
Blackberries are the one thing from my time there that I do not look upon fondly. Harvesting always required wearing clothing I couldn’t stand to have on, to protect me from a plant I wanted nothing to do with… it was just not a good experience, and so I’m a bit tainted on blackberries now. They taste fine, but I don’t want them. My parents would mow a corridor through the brambles and we’d just sort of do our best… but yeah hitting that quota suuuucked.
I enjoyed reading it, I have some blackberries in the back of my garden and my son loves them.
I will be doing the harvesting for the foreseeable future though because they’re proper sharp thorns and the little one would just hurt himself.
As for sprinting maybe that’s an audhd thing. I also went everywhere at top speed… and was a notable track athlete despite zero formal training.
Brambleberries aren’t something to throw kids at as a requirement, so good on you for “this is where they come from but it sucks” sort of mentality. As long as they know this delicious thing is waiting for them if they take a risk, that risk is all but taken.
If I could have eaten 2/3of the berries I collected, I’d probably like them. But being set to a quota made them undesirable.
Hey good to hear the need for speed worked out for you! I bucked authority by being a girl wrestler back when that was pretty rare in the US (still is, but less; this was around 2k), and I’m still all about challenging authority so that worked poorly for me overall ;) it probably hit a lot of the same dopamine/endorphin systems as running. So that’s great :) (genuinely!)