Tales from a Wine Country Homestead: We Have Blackberries!

July 29, 2018

Santa Rosa, CA

The sweet taste of summer: blackberries, fresh from the bramble!

Scott's first... and possibly last...harvest from the wild blackberry bushes on our new property. Hard-won, but simply divine - like no blackberries I've ever tasted!! And I think he may even have managed to avoid the poison oak this time!

We just recently learned, as in earlier today on a local hiking trail (from a posted sign, not from experience, thankfully...this time...), that this is what poison oak looks like. Apparently the tell-tale "leaves of three" turn a deep red at this time of year, for those of us who need more of a clue than mere leaf formation.  City Slicker Learning #53.

Those pretty, red leaves there? Poison oak, in summer. On our property. In abundance. Ugh.

Anyway, enough about that, and back to other hazards on the homestead.  

"You know how when, you're trying to pick blackberries in what's been described as an "aggressive blackberry bramble," and you're between two large, long, thorny, nettle-y branches, and you reach for a berry and feel the pokes through the back of your shirt, and so try to twist out of it and find yourself only getting further and hopelessly attached to the bush, both on the front and back, and you start trying to devise how you might get to your phone to text your wife for help if you can actually get a signal, but then realize you might be able to slip out of your shirt that seems permanently intertwined with the bramble, so you carefully disrobe within view of your new neighbor's house to squirm out of the situation and then spend the next several minutes trying to detach your shirt? Just curious. It's never happened to me, but seems like it could happen to some city boy who buys himself acreage in farm country." 

                                                                      -Scott, Raw-Land-Owning City Boy

Our Aggressive Blackberry Bramble

But...delicious, sun-ripened and -warmed fruit!

The "safe" portion of our property, near the road, where Caroline hangs out and waits (impatiently) while Scott grapples with poison oak and wild blackberry brambles in the deep interior... ;-)