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Blackberries, the fruit of the gods.
The best things in life are free.
Every August, my wife and I go on a few blackberry picking sprees. We have a couple of locations that we keep secret and on any given blackberry picking day, we can fill two plastic ice cream pails of this delicious, free fruit in the space of an hour.
Even though the blackberry plants we pick from, (the Himilayan Blackberry) are considered an invasive species, the fruit is far tastier and sweeter than the fruit from the cultivated blackberry plant.
On the negative side of the Himalayan variety are the prickles. The older the plant, the larger the thorns, and some of them are quite big as I have discovered to my detriment. When we embark on a blackberry picking excursion, we arm ourselves in longsleeved, denim shirts (no matter how hot it is), jeans, and shoes or boots with solid soles. I discovered one time that old runners do not protect the sole of the foot from a large, dried out and tough blackberry thorn underfoot.
We always take a walking cane with a curved handle as they come in hand for dragging the long high growing blackberry canes closer so the big juicy ones that always seem to grow on the…
