Catholic Family Vignettes

Defeated. The birds have beat us to the blackberries. Watching, waiting and braving the poison ivy jungle have gained us approximately two cups of blackberries...enough for a couple batches of blackberry pancakes. No blackberry pie. No blackberry jam. No blackberry cordial.

This weekend I will brave the wilds of the domesticated blackberry farm where I will stand amidst the thornless, trellised beauties and grasp handfuls - a privilege I will gladly pay for!

The next couple of days will be rather busy. My daughter, Caitlin, is coming for a visit on Thursday. Friday, the three older boys will be serving a requiem Mass in Newark. The weekend will be spent canning and freezing - the joyful preservation of the summer harvest.

Light blogging ahead... Read more!

The blackberries are nearly ripe! Prickly bushes loaded with sweet, juicy blackberries are clustered along the perimeter of the wooded grove behind our home. Yesterday evening, Maximilian informed us that there were "hundweds and hundweds" of ripe blackberries. Armed with an assortment of containers, we made the trek...and returned with approximately 1 cup of blackberries. Sigh...my children have extremely fertile imaginations!

The good news: there are "hundweds and hundweds" that are in the process of ripening. Surrounded, I might add, by a rather frightening amount of poison ivy. Needless to say, Zachary will not be picking blackberries (he is horribly sensitive to the dreaded weed!) One more week...then all we must do is "out pick" the birds and avoid the thorns, snakes and poison ivy. Maybe I'll check out that nice blackberry farm in London... Read more!