Quickberry! Quackberry! Pick Me a Blackberry!

Here in the valley blackberry bushes grow like weeds. In fact, most people here consider them weeds; Luke and I saw blackberry bush killer in the weed killer section of Home Depot (our new second home since we’ve taken on this management job). This was a shock to us because we can’t even imagine killing the bushes that produce such tasty berries.

People – like my mother and grandmother – from central Oregon drive for hours over the mountains to get to the blackberry bushes that grow here. A couple of weeks ago, Luke and I got wind that a trip was being planned by the matriarchs of my family to come and pick blackberries because their stashes of blackberry jam were running dangerous low.

Poor Luke had never been blackberry picking (or any type of berry picking, for all I know) – yet another thing he was deprived of growing up in the desert. So we decided to go. We drove for an hour, pulled off the highway at this little town and toolie-bopped down the local roads to the berry patch.

My mother tried to warn Luke about how blackberry bushes bite you and the other hidden dangers of berry picking (eating more than you put in your bucket, spiders, purple fingers, berries that commit berricide which is the blackberry equivalent of suicide. It’s when the berries are so ripe and delicious that they don’t want to be picked so they fall off the bush right as you are going to reach for them, never to be seen again.)

Luke was brave though, and jumped into – sometimes literally – the thick of it and started picking away. There were times when he would yelp and holler in pain, but those times were forgotten/worth it whenever he found a really good berry. He would take his pruners and cut away any vine that was blocking his way to a good cluster of berries. He was ruthless; but let’s face it, blackberries = weeds = no one cares.


I talked my little sister, Missy, into coming with to “help with the berry picking because everyone needs to have the experience”…aka: babysit.

*This was toward the end and Z was getting bored.*

I think that I picked one too many blackberries when I was a kid and now I can’t stand them; I think they are gross. So I did not do any picking. I walked around with the camera, taking pictures and finding more spots to pick so that mom and Luke didn’t have to find them themselves when they finished picking in one area. (Whew! That was a doozy of a wordy sentence! Sorry, I am too lazy to rewrite it.)

*Luke's bucket...but he picked even more after this picture was taken*

My grandma was on a roll off in her own area. She’s a lone ranger of sorts. Her bucket was over-flowing by the time we got her to stop.

We had a lot of fun! We finished off the day by eating lunch together at a yummy hamburger restaurant and then we all went our separate ways. Luke is excited to get his blackberry jam made from the very berries he helped pick!

*Everyone and their purple fingers from picking berries. Except for Z...she's just following the crowd.*