Blackberry Picking

Back in August after we came back to California from the enchanted land of Rhode Island, my husband and I went blackberry picking. It was a "massive" two-day adventure and tons of fun!

On Day 1, he was not at all well dressed for the prickly patch just a short hop through the forest.

I think he realized that. He has pretty solid feet but even a hobbit's feet would get tired of the prickles after awhile.

Step carefully darling! The blackberry patch is on the side of a seasonal pond in the woods from my folks' house. It was all dried up save for some squishy mud when we were there. You can see the bank rising off to the left of the picture.

Still, even with no shoes, he did scramble all over the place and pick quite a lot of berries. His trusty walking stick helped quite a bit. His scaredy-cat wife, not so much.

On Day 2, he came much better dressed in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, gloves and boots.

And as a result, he was all over the place even more than the previous time.

He even climbed up a dead tree to reach a cluster of large berries.

That's the area he was climbing around in the above photos.

I helped, a but anyway but I still helped.

The main bank of the pond

with all the berries.

These beauties are the gnarly wild gooseberries.

They're gorgeous

And you'll never guess how you eat them

You just take the prickly berry and pop it in your mouth. My family loves doing that to newbies.

There were even some blackberry flowers still out. This one has a bee on it.

But only a few.

There were lots of red and green berries that would ripen to the luscious black ones.

It was an interesting task to pick only the black ripe berries.

There were also a ton of slugs in the one lone muddy patch of the pond.

We think they were getting ready to hunker down for the winter.

See?

I was having fun taking pictures of the grass clumps since grass doesn't really grow up there.

Being a Rhode Islander, he loves the grass.

He looks happy doesn't he? That's because he just picked all of

These yummy fruits

and

He stole the camera and took my picture. Silly man.