Wacky weather! and berry talk
It’s been hot here for ages. And no rain… I had to water the blackberries and I’ve not had to do that before. Dry and cool is weird tho. It’s been doing this off and on super low temps… Hey, sorry, I need a sweater if it gets much below 80.
These last few days… whoa! I need a sweater on! We are having record lows. It’s July, and the low tonight is supposed to get to 55!!!! Normal July temps don’t drop below 70.
Today we finally got rain along with the low temps. Thank goodness. I think we got about an inch of rain, looking into all the things that can collect rain outside. Sweet! Now if it would just do this again say on Friday morning, next Tuesday, and keep repeating until we catch up… I might be able to skip watering my plants.
The giant green june bugs that show up in July are eating the blackberries. We filled 1/4 of the chest freezer with bags of berries and then I went around to neighbors asking if they wanted to pick any. Kids across the street picked a good gallon or so…. Brent with the nice veggies didn’t show up as far as I know. I told him (and his parents) to just come over and pick em, no need to knock on door or anything. And that they’d better be quick, because the bugs were about to get all the berries.
I’m not picking any more. Let the bugs have them. When those giant green july bugs get in there, they are worse than the little japanese beetles… those suckers fly into you and almost knock you down.
But since our berries did so well this year… even tho they did have to be watered…. Ron and I talked about having a blackberry farm. With what we have now, we could expand greatly. We’d have to take over some of the hay/pasture field, but it could be done.
Then I remember how much work it is to pick the berries… and they have to be picked if you don’t get customers. And I’m not an early riser these days, altho I guess I could trrain myself to be again. Maybe we could do thornless blackberries, some blueberries… and some fall bearing raspberries.
What I want are seedless berries. If there are such a thing. I love the flavor of a ripe raspberry, or blueberry or strawberry or blackberry… and I hate seeds. Even the tiny seeds of strawberries… well, I can’t stand em. I hate those seeds crunching when I expect to be eating something soft and soothing.
With our luck, the people that cut our hay/pasture field down for hay would miss our fencing and just brushhog our new berry plants and run over the fence. People that drive tractors around here aren’t paying a whole lot of attention to what they are running over. The fence now has been there for years… if we put up new fence they might not notice it.
Pipe dream anyhow. But seeing how much people were charging for fresh blackberries at the farmers market in Fayetteville… I could have been making big bucks. $4 or $5 a pint, which is still way better than the small grocery store price of $4 a half pint… and I picked gallons, dang it.
I will be doing something with the berries I picked…. Ron doesn’t care if they’ve been frozen or not. Cooking em amounts to the same thing anyhow. And my Mother owns a really nice food mill that I’ve used to take the seeds out of raspberries…. just gotta borrow it from her. I love that thing. I used it the last time I picked and froze lots of raspberries…. and gave everyone jars of seedless jam. I need to do the same with the blackberries!
I think I’m finally getting tired…
g’night for tonight!
That’s a LOT of puppies!