Looking forward to when the blackberries

[I_UndergroundPanther]

are ripe.

There is a crapload of wild blackberry bushes all over my apartment complex.
I think the other residents have no clue of what they are.

In a week and a half I'm gonna pick like 5 lbs of delicious blackberries or more.
I grew up a short distance from here literally like 4 miles away.
My father taught me when I was young about finding and using
all the wild and edible plants out here.
When you are on foodstamps and know how to forage for wild foods it really stretches those dollars...lol.

Looking forward to making keto blackberry cobbler,keto blackberry muffins,
keto blackberry granola,keto ice cream topped with blackberries...and blackberry yogurt and blackberries with homemade whipped cream.

and the next edible berry to ripen are the mulberries.
Oh how I adore mulberries.
Found both black and white mulberry trees nearby.

Mulberries are the worlds most expensive fruit because they are so perishable.
People look at mulberry trees like weeds. They have no clue what they have. Mulberry wood is brilliant yellow that cures to a beautiful golden yellow wood.
I have a few wands I have carved from mulberry tree branches.

Saw a pack of dried mulberries at Wegmans last year for ten bucks for what looked like at most 7 berries.

I pick pounds of them for free and flash freeze what I don't devour walking back home.

I made a mulberry pie before I became diabetic, and made a mulberry cheesecake people went bonkers over.. I'm gonna make a mulberry keto cheesecake this year.

Free berries are the only thing good about summer.
Oh, and lightning bugs.

[BlueJac]

1. I have picked wild blackberries many times in the NW,,but Florida doesn't have them. Enjoy!

[I_UndergroundPanther]

4. Sad you cant get wild blackberries

in Florida..
Florida has hot summers that last a lot longer than in Maryland.
I'm not a fan of hot weather I actually hate it.
It's also overrun with asshole republicans.

You could'nt pay me to live in Florida.


Each to thier own.

[The Blue Flower]

10. Not true

I've picked them many times in the panhandle.

[Phoenix61]

16. Central and North Florida have wild blackberries all over.

Me and my Grandpa used to pick them and grandma would turn them into cobbler and pancakes and syrup. Yum!!!

[Trueblue1968]

23. OREGON has TONS of wild Blackberries!!!

[GulfCoast66]

26. Florida does indeed have them.

It’s been years, but I used to pick them on what is now the International Drive extension in Orlando. Covered with hotels now. Used to be a dirt road with deer stands in trees.

And I see the around my work property all the time.

But they ripen much earlier. A month or so ago.

[paleotn]

2. Reminds me of wandering along fence rows as a kid...

eating wild blackberries as I go.

[Blue_true]

12. I used to do that walking along roads near my home,

looking carefully for rattlesnakes before I stepped near a cluster of blackberry bushes.

The Florida legislature just approved an unbroken green belt that runs the length of the state south to north (to the Georgia line). Surprisingly, DeSantis signed the overwhelmingly bipartisan bill. What will happen is money will be allocated regularly to buy up a continuous strip of land running the length of the state south to north and turning that land into 100% wild land (natural plant growth, no farms, no homes, only state ranger roads). It is a wonderful idea and I am sure that millions of Floridians would contribute money to the effort of the legislature comes up short.

[Quakerfriend]

3. Sounds fabulous!

And, you are so right about Mulberry trees- so few around, people cut them all down!
Our wine berries will be popping open any day now! I can’t wait!
Please, post some pictures of your pickings if you get the chance!

[I_UndergroundPanther]

9. will do

right now the berries are red and some are green. found a dinky little ripe one while I was looking over a couple of bushes yesterday,ate it..lol

[Cracklin Charlie]

5. Get some bug spray.

And shower after picking. Blackberry bushes are notorious chigger habitat.

I was driving home for a weekend with a friend from college. Driving along, look over to the railroad tracks, and there was a man and lady picking blackberries from the bushes along the tracks. My friend says “Was that your mom and dad?” Me: “Nah”.

It was (I knew it all along). I had blackberry cobbler after supper that night!

[I_UndergroundPanther]

11. I use bug spray all over

and I have anti bug leggings soldiers wore in WW1 they are made of heavy canvas fit over your shoes and pant legs so bugs cant get in your pants. My father gave them to me. Chiggers and ticks suck literally. I wear gloves too cause of fucking poison ivy too.I look at poison ivy I itch.I am allergic to it. Many times growing up I got it on my face. My mom used liquid white shoe polish in an applicator as a remedy and it worked. Maybe it was the tannic acid..

[Arkansas Granny]

15. I've always said that if chiggers were big enough to be seen with the naked eye, they'd be venomous.

I don't know if they like blackberries or if they know some fool will come pick the berries. The worst chiggers infestations I've ever had came from picking blackberries unprotected.

[CRK7376]

27. My dad got chigger bites every year while picking Blackerries.

His solution was to wear old fishing waders, plus they gave pretty good protection from the thorns. We would pick berries along the side of the highways. Cars going by must have thought we had escaped from the looney buin wearing fishing waders into a sea of Blackkberry stickers....with a milk jug.......I don't wear the waders anymore, but I think about them and my Dad every time I pick berries....

[Arkansas Granny]

30. I can only imagine the looks he got. I'll bet it was effective, however.

[StarryNite]

7. I love mulberries.

I remember my older sister climbing my grandmother's mulberry tree and picking the berries for us when we were kids. Now planting new mulberry trees is illegal in Phoenix and other parts of AZ due to it being an allergen. A few years ago I was able to finally get a small branch I cut from my dad's old mulberry tree to root. His was a male. Mine turned out to be a female. It's about 7' tall now and more of a bush than a tree. It hasn't produced many berries over the few years it's been growing. However, the leaves are a great food for my desert tortoises. That's really why I wanted the tree/bush...for the tortoises. I had no idea I would get a female. My dad died nearly 3 years ago. His mulberry tree was cut down a number of years ago, before he died. So now my mulberry bush means more to me than ever even if it never produces berries.

[ProfessorGAC]

17. Have One In The Backyard

And there's 40 or 50 at the golf course.
We see the deer feeding on them almost daily.
I've been a mulberry fan since I was a little kid.

[StarryNite]

19. Awww that's really neat.

At the house I grew up in we had a couple of big male mulberry trees in the backyard. They were so pretty and did remarkably well in the desert. It's a shame they have outlawed planting new ones.

[ProfessorGAC]

21. In The Village Where The Course Is...

...mulberries run wild.
I know people who've cut down 3 to 6 (each yard) because they started popping up everywhere.
If they let them be, we could open a mulberry jam factory and shipping of incoming berries would be a high school kid on an ATV!
Two Saturdays back, there was a female deer snacking behind a par 3.
We hit. Both balls hit green 80 feet from the deer. No reaction.
We drive up. Now, we're 70 feet from the deer. Sees us, turns around, back to snacking!
We finish, get in the cart. We didn't take path, though. We went in front of green so we wouldn't disturb her dessert. (She would have bolted otherwise, as the path is 5 feet from where she was.)
We see a lot of deer out there. Plus lots of hawks & egrets.
The geese we could live without!

[StarryNite]

28. Obviously your environment is much better for the mulberries...

and deer. LOL The mulberries do very well here but not so well that they start sprouting up on their own like that. Mulberry trees, deer, hawks, egrets, and even geese, it sounds beautiful. There are deer in the desert but you see them very often.

[cachukis]

8. My local produce guy put out some ripe

Winter Haven blackberries for .99 a package. Bought 18 for the freezer. Sweet.

[Crunchy Frog]

13. We have black raspberries up and down the street here.

Im going to start picking tomorrow. Should be really good because of how much rain we're getting.

We also have mulberry trees growing along the driveway, but they can be really difficult to spot, and tend to end up on the driveway before we can manage to do anything with them.

Berries are alot of fun.

[Ellipsis]

14. ...made a mulberry pie about 10 days ago.

They are heavy producers this year.

Blackberries are being harvested as we speak.

[magicarpet]

18. Another few weeks before our blackberries are ready here in Maine. The raspberries are ready for ,..

.... picking now.

Enjoy,.. Have fun.

[CatWoman]

20. growing up in Virginia, we used to pick all kinds of berries

and it's criminal what stores charge for them now.

[happybird]

22. They smell so wonderful when blooming!

It’s something I look forward to every year.

There are some here in the woods around my house, and my parents’ woods are full of them.
One of their favorite punishments when I was a teenager was to make me pick berries- especially if I was hungover, lol! We had a whole freezer full of bags of blackberries.

[H2O Man]

24. Recommended.

Dry the leaves for a good and healthy tea.

[CRK7376]

25. I've got 2 gallons of blackberries

in the freezer as of 8:00am this morning. Watched and helped my Dad pick Blackberries for years. We would go to the highway and wade into the BB patches for free berries. Now my wife and I have a small farm and I don't cut down BB vines if at all possible. Love BB pie and cobler. My wife tolerates them and makes the pies for me because of love....I probably ate a gallon of berries today before freezing the first two gallons...We have two Mulberry trees and I eagerly await their arrival each spring. We've had ripe Mulberries for about 3 weeks now and they are slowing down. Our chickens and one of my hounds like them too. I had to cut some of the branches off this spring, they were banging into my wifes car, and a FedEx or Amazon delivery truck snapped off a couple of low branches.....I haven't seen the White Mulberries...

[GulfCoast66]

29. My wife does not like Blackberries. The seeds and all.

They might be my favorite fruit. Although black raspberries are awesome. Did not even know about them till I met my Midwestern wife. Not a southern plant.

If blackberry cobbler and ice cream was my last meal I would die happy.

[Shellback Squid]

31. Love it!

[smirkymonkey]

32. We used to have wild blackberries growing all over our village and in the woods when I was

growing up. They were so delicious! So sweet and flavorful. The same with the wild strawberries and raspberries.

Nothing like those huge tasteless cultivated blackberries you get in the supermarket these days. I wouldn't eat those if they were giving them away.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

33. Wild blackberries are the best.

[nuxvomica]

34. We used to gather them in vacant lots when I was a kid

They grow wild around here, especially under decks. And concord grapes grow wild along fences. And wild strawberries in unkempt lawns. It's a cornucopia if one takes it easy on the mowing and weed-whacking. My grandfather's house, where my mom grew up but what is now a cozy little residential bistro, had a fence where the blackberries and concords grew wild and hybridized, producing grapes that tasted like blackberries.