Pickin' Berries

By: Angela Gillaspie Copyright © July 2005, All Rights Reserved

Summertime in Alabama brings a bounty of berries. You can see some of the best tasting blueberries, blackberries, huckleberries, dewberries, gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, and many other kinds of berries growing wild on roadsides, clustered in wooded areas, climbing fences and in Uncle Clifton's garden.

You'd be hard pressed to find anyone - child or adult - that never went berry picking. Could this be a remnant of our hunter-gatherer past or just the irresistible draw of plump delicious berries that grow right next to your driveway?

I believe that berry picking is an important rite of passage for younguns. Only a mature person can go alone to fill a poke with berries and return unharmed because berry picking has a few risks.

Picking blackberries, for example, can get you a painful bite or sting, plus the thorny vines hide snakes. Bees, ants, and chiggers lurk around every plump cluster of sweetness. I always took along my collie Chippy so that he would scare off all the creepy crawly critters. If Chippy was somewhere chasing chickens, I found that singing loudly while picking berries run off snakes (and other berry pickers).

When I picked blackberries, I had a good two miles of red clay packed ditches to choose from. Berry bushes that grew on the side of the road didn't have as many snakes as the berries that grew in the woods. The berries were always fat and I couldn't resist sampling every fourth or fifth handful. I learned the hard way that I shouldn't just blindly pick berries and stuff them in my mouth. Stinkbugs taste awful and ants can really hurt your tongue when they sting.

Picking blueberries is much different than picking blackberries. You have to pluck one blackberry at a time, avoiding thorns and being careful not to squish the fruit. Although blueberries grow near poison oak, it's much easier dodging poison oak than thorns, plus you can grab a handful of blueberries at a time because blueberries grow in clusters.

What I hated most about picking blueberries were chigger bites. Chiggers are tiny larval mites that bite you in the most tightly clothed, sweaty, and unmentionable places possible. Chiggers love hanging around berry patches where they can feast (and torture) any mammal, amphibian, and reptile that comes to feast on berries.

Wearing pants (tucked into boots), long sleeves and high collars and sweating to death deters chiggers from dining on your armpits and other areas. But I never bought into that and wore nothing more than my bathing suit top, shorts and flip-flops. In light of my flimsy clothing, Momma dusted me with sulfur powder before I set off berry pickin'. You could smell me a mile away.

The most fearsome predator I encountered when berry picking was the one associated with strawberries. Since strawberries are usually grown in patches on someone's property and rarely found in the wild, the owner of the berry patch can get pretty nasty when he catches you poaching his berries.

Berry poachers might be met with weapons, taunts, threats, and sometimes law enforcement, so if you get a hankerin' for strawberries that ain't yours, your best bet is to just go to the danged store and buy some.

There were two reasons I picked berries: 1) for me, and 2) for Momma. When I picked berries for myself, I did it for a quick berry fix or to earn money for wax lips and atomic fireballs. When snacking, I'd only need a few handfuls and the size, shape, and appearance of the berries didn't matter. But if I were picking berries for profit, the berries had to be pretty, big and plentiful.

I cut the top off an old plastic gallon-sized milk jug then headed out to fill it full of berries. A gallon of blackberries went for anywhere from a dollar to five bucks - big time money for a kid back in the 70's.

When Momma wanted berries, the size and shape didn't matter, but the amount and ripeness did because recipes called for specific amounts and berries that weren't ripe were too sour. Sour berries made a sour Momma, and sweet berries made a sweet Momma. Blueberries went into pancakes and muffins, and blackberries were for cobblers, jam, and jelly.

Now I'm blessed with wild blueberry and huckleberry bushes and blackberry vines on my property, along with Mulberry trees, black cherry trees, and muscadine vines. I'm planning on planting strawberries too, just so my kids will be well-rounded berry pickers - heaven forbid one of them being a berry poacher.

Welsh novelist Richard Llewellyn best described blackberry flavor in this quote: "O, blackberry tart, with berries as big as your thumb, purple and black, and thick with juice, and a crust to endear them that will go to cream in your mouth, and both passing down with such a taste that will make you close your eyes and wish you might live forever in the wideness of that rich moment."

Whether you pick berries from the side of the road or from Uncle Clifton's off-limits patch, it's hard to beat that great taste of danger, hard work and sweet sunshine all wrapped up into a thumb-sized berry so plump that it's about to burst with dark juicy goodness.

Stay tuned for more SouthernAngel's berry-pickin' articles!