Depending on how long you have been following and reading the blog for you may or may not know that it is a yearly tradition for us, as a family, to go blackberry picking.
My Aunt has always struggled with her own mental health issues and as a child it was always hit or miss if we spent time with her or not. However, every year, rain or shine, she always took us blackberry picking and from that we would make a range of different treats.
This wonderful childhood memory has subsequently turned into a tradition with the boys and myself to go foraging for fruit at the end of the summer.
With Ben now on hand to help us out on the more physical and strenuous activities we thought we would invite him to join our tradition. We decided to make it a little more fun too and split into teams to see who would pick the most.
James chose Ben which seemed like a fair matching. Ben is extremely tall so he definitely had the added bonus of reaching all the good ones that are out of reach. However, James needs more one to one time to participate and not chase every butterfly that catches his attention; he is also a little more cautious with the bramble so wouldn't be the first to jump in.
This, therefore, meant that William was with me which, again, was a great matching. We had our plan: I would use my wheelchair and become a battering ram to get into the bushes more deeply and for anything high up William good just stand on me! William is also much more daring and would happily jump into a bramble bush to "get the good stuff" or find "a little gold mine" as he was saying!
That was it, the search and game was on!
The difficult thing we found this year was that the amount of fruit available was rather limited. The little rain had plumped some of the blackberries up. However, on the other end of the spectrum with the we were a little early for the sun to make them become ripe; I am sure if we went back next week we would find that hundreds of the red ones would be perfect now!
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.
Even if one shouted that they found some and ended up in competition for it!
So, how did we get on?
Well, I hate to say this but James and Ben clearly won! However, I do have a valid reason for this; On climbing onto the wheelchair to reach up William tipped our tub a little too far and ended up tipping half of our back into the bush. Yet, according to the other guys this doesn't matter and we still lost!
What we did manage to do collectively is to fill the entire box! All we have to do is separate them, freeze them and then make them into something yummy (watch this space for some recipes from William)
I love that for the last 3 years (with both boys, 4 with William and myself) that we are building a little family tradition to go fruit picking in the summer that has been passed down through generations. It is now something that the boys point out at the beginning of the summer holidays once they start spotting more and more popping up, which, of course, I love.
Obviously this year we had the kind help from Ben but it was still great and the added competition made it a lovely day out! However, William and I are totally winning next year! ;)
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