berries

The berry farm, Gizditch’s, was only u-picking boysenberries. An old woman on her way out met us at the bridge, happy and carrying juice stained containers full of berries with juice stained hands. Between wide smiles she told us that she had picked last week and made a pie and was back again for more. The furthest rows, the back ones, still have the best berries, she said. So, after taring our containers with the farm kids, we walked out into the field and found the berries at the back and began to pick and sample and drop and even put some in our containers. Picking these berries is a tricky business; the bushes have lots of small thorns and some big ones. The droops, the clusters of little dooplets that we normally call berries, are sometimes barely held together because of how ripe they are. Pulling on the berry itself yields stained fingers and a tiny pile of disassembled ballettes, the individual droops, on the ground. All this berry biological anatomical specificity is really hard! The trick is to pull on the cap, the little green flower shaped lid that housed the proto-berry before it began to fill with juice and ripen, and then drop the cap but keep the berry in your cupped hand. My success rate of doing this was in the 90% range, which I think would be considered quite low if I was doing this professionally. So much price paid for so few berries in the mouth or bucket. But they’re so good! We netted 6 pounds of berries, red-purple hands, and more than a few scratches and thorns. Pulling on the caps, while not exactly safe, had come to feel like the most natural way to get these juicy delights out of their brambley homes. My hands were pricked and scratched, and happy.

jg

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