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I've never been much of a fan of blackberries. I think I was put off them very young, after seeing some blackberries being soaked after picking and about a million tiny maggots collecting at the bottom of the bowl of water.

Also, they have to be the most annoying berry to pick. They're always, without fail, in a bloody awkward place to get to, and when you do get over whatever fence, bush or patch of nettles, they have a load of thorns just waiting to scratch the hell out of you.

And when you do get to pick some.. they're never that big or impressive. They're never like the ones in the shops.

Except.. where I'm working has some of the most easily accessible blackberry bushes with bloody great huge blackberries sitting on them just waiting to be picked. Which I did yesterday. I picked just over a kilo, while being paid to work I may add.. in about half an hour. There's shed loads still there waiting to ripen up. An hour after getting home, I had 5 jars of jam cooling down on the windowsill.

So.. blackberries? Useful to have about, or just too much hard work to get a handful of berries and a million scratches?

Anyone have any good blackberry recipes?

postie wrote:I've never been much of a fan of blackberries. I think I was put off them very young, after seeing some blackberries being soaked after picking and about a million tiny maggots collecting at the bottom of the bowl of water.

Protein. What's the problem?

And when you do get to pick some.. they're never that big or impressive.
They're never like the ones in the shops.

That's because shop-bought blackberries are domesticated cultivars.

Little known fact:

http://www.altnature.com/gallery/Blackberry.htm

Blackberry Herbal Use and Medicinal Properties

Blackberry is edible and medicinal. Used extensively by the Native American tribes, it had many other surprising uses. The leaf is more commonly used as a medicinal herb, but the root also has medicinal value. Young edible shoots are harvested in the spring, peeled and used in salads.

You want the ends of big, fat, aggressive shoots, and you want them when the spines are still soft. You should be able to gently break off the ends.

Make some clones: http://www.ehow.com/how_5897012_clone-b ... ushes.html

I've just picked over a kg of blackberries, we have an amazing plant with large juicy berries.

None of ours are ready yet.

(Soft southerner, you)

There are a couple of hundred different species of blackberry, and they hybridise. When I was at school, a year or two ago, my biology teacher was a blackberry expert. He had written a textbook on the genus Rubus.

Just put eight pounds of broad beans in the freezer.

We have blackberry plants but we always head out into the wider countryside to pick wild bramble berries. The resulting jelly (not jam) is fantastic and well worth the stinging nettles and arms/hands scratched to pieces.

Bedrock Barney wrote:We have blackberry plants but we always head out into the wider countryside to pick wild bramble berries. The resulting jelly (not jam) is fantastic and well worth the stinging nettles and arms/hands scratched to pieces.

What's the difference???? Brambles.. blackberries... i thought they were the same. AND jam.. or jelly???? Aaargh, you've confuddled me now

To make jelly rather than jam the fruit has to pass through some sort of sieve, often a muslin cloth, to strain out the lumpy bits.

I don't think there's much in the words blackberry and bramble. Like I said, there are a couple of hundred species in the genus Rubus and then all the hybrids and cultivars on top. We have them growing in different parts of our land and the fruits are distinctive. I'm not sure how much the differences are owing to genetics and how much to environment though.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus

and from the delightful http://hedgerowmobile.com/brambles.html

Possibly as many as 387 subspecies of Rubus have been described in Britain alone.

trying to get a bush to grow in the corner of my garden where nothing else will grow. this year we have enough for a pie, no more.

Still a lot of ripening to be done at this time of year

wild are much tastier and probably even more nutritious, I suppose.