Blackberry Picking

 

It has turned into a tradition with the boys and myself to go foraging for fruit at the end of the summer.

 

We are lucky that we have a wide countryside on our doorstep.

 

 

Sadly, every time we wanted to venture out we were hit with the heavy rain that seemed to consume the summer holidays. Luckily we managed to find one day to take advantage of and although dressed up for bad weather we went and risked the trip. This time in the hunt of Blackberries. 

 

 

 

With bags at the ready both boys went foraging. They know by now that they are looking for plump black berries that are easy to pull off.

 

The difficult thing we found this year was that the amount of fruit available was rather limited. The rain had plumped the blackberries up that the second we touched them they would fall apart. On the other end of the spectrum with the lack of sun there were many that hadn't quite become ripe yet.

 

This, however, is the best part of foraging; going around carefully looking for what we could find. Luckily both boys would quite often find these little "gold mines" where the fruits was plentiful and stay picking for minutes at a time.

 

William's bravery always amazes me. Whilst James and I kept to the outside and collected William would often walk right into the bramble patches to get to the "Good stuff".

 

(Yes, I would like to point out that William gave up collecting and putting them into the bags that we brought and did start just using his hat!)

 

 

Something that we all love around here is that you will often find others doing exactly the same. This year we met 3 different groups of people collecting which with ripe blackberries being slightly short in supply it did become a little competitive in places.

 

 

Most years we find around two ice cream tubs fall of blackberries, enough to make a crumble and our own homemade jam. Sadly we only filled one.

 

So what do we make? Well that part was easy.....we made a lovely blackberry and Apple crumble (Apples taken from Granddad's tree in the garden) 

 

I love that for the last 2 years (with both boys, 3 with William and myself) that we are building a little family tradition to go fruit picking in the summer and I hope that this is something that we can continue to do for many years to come.