Wild Berries

On Friday, I visited my community garden plot to do some maintenance chores such as weeding, watering, fertilizing and training the tomato vines. After finishing my chores, I decided to try foraging for some wild berries. I've never actually foraged before but I am familiar with various berries as I grow my own cultivated blackberries. The community garden is surrounded on 3 sides by various types of vegetation such as forest, brush, and high grass...all 3 are perfect berry habitat. Also, last year I noticed blackberry/dewberry in the area so I thought I would have a go at it.

I was almost immediately rewarded by finding a large patch of berries. After further inspection, I determined that the berries were black rasberries. You can tell the difference between a rasberry and blackberry by the way the stem appears after you pick it off the vine. With a rasberry, the stem will remain on the vine, leaving a concave depression within the berry. When blackberries are picked, the entire stem is removed, resulting in a berry that is more uniform in shape.


After finding the rasberries, I got very excited and decided to walk around the entire field to see what else I could find. Tucked beside a grassy path amid some overgrown brush, I found what I believe are blueberries. The bushes were in their flowering stage with clusters of several white cup-like flowers. Honeybees were busy polinating the flowers. Also, the leaf shape and size appears to be consistent with pictures of blueberry bushes. I will keep checking on these bushes to see if berries appear and turn blue...hopefully they do.

The pursuit is alive and well...

Don't worry...my produce pursuit is still alive and well. I haven't posted for quite some time for various reasons. The main reason is that my wife and I recently welcomed the arrival of our third son. A lot of my free time (if you want to call it free time...) was spent helping with the new baby and taking care of the other children. I took some time off work so i was able to enjoy everyone's company. I did manage to tend to the gardens the best I could, but I was just not motivated enough to blog.

I am happy to say that I did harvest some veggies...tons of lettuce, a few peas (disappointing this year), and some yellow and zucchini squash. The squash were harvested from the community garden, everything else was in the backyard garden. Also, after losing some tomato plants to a devastating rain and needing to replant, my tomatoes are now doing well.