Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Blackberries

Ode to the Blackberry Patch

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There is a natural order to things. A progression that life, land, nay, even civilation itself must traverse. Things are born, they grow, then they must pass away. Such is the world we have.

And like all things of this world, our beloved patch of blackberry also went through the inevitable development: wrestled back from the wild, converted into productive farm land, thus yielding bountiful berries. But then the disease set in, and drought, and floods. We fought with ingenuity, with science. We fought with sweat and toil. We pruned and picked. But alas, it succombed to the fate of all our land: from beautiful rows of delicious brambles, to a parking lot.

We loved you blackberry patch. We will miss you. You taught us much, and now we park our trucks on you. But beneath the gravel, we also buried a piece of our hearts.

Posted by Duff Neill and Anja Weyant

Trimming Blackberries

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This year we did not start trimming blackberries until the initial grape pruning was done.  But luckily the days are getting longer …  and a bit warmer 🙂

After
Before

Work in Progress….

Blackberry Season

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We are in the middle of a drought – at least on our farm.  There have been downpours just a few miles away, several times, but our grass is brown and our garden is in a sad stage.  We’ve been irrigating the blackberries as much as possible, since harvest time is starting.

Nonetheless, there are berries.  In the last week, we picked over 850 lbs and about 1/3 of them are beautiful.  The others were cleaned and frozen and will be used/sold for making jams, shrubs, or wine. We will still be picking for a while – and hoping for rain!

We do have fun picking them, even in the heat…and they are delicious.

Rachel is picking in the summer heat
Elena loves her berries
Delicious

We’ll still be picking for a while – and hoping for rain!

Making “Fruit-leather”… and Jerkey

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Samantha got us a “kick-ass” dehydrator for Christmas. The first thing Jeff made in it was – of course – deer jerky, which turned out great.

But then we experimented with making fruit leather – the fruit roll-up kind of snacks.  We thawed out some of our seedless blackberry puree (the same kind we use for making jam), and then cooked it with SureJel and sugar, only we used more than twice the amount of fruit than the jam recipe calls for.  This thickened the puree enough to be able to spread it on the trays of the dehydrator.   I should mention that we got non-stick silicon sheets for the trays – which was very helpful.

We also spread out some of our homemade applesauce on two additional trays.  We let the fruit dry for about 8 hours,then peeled them off the sheets onto a cutting board.  We then sliced and rolled up the dried fruit puree.  They turned out really well, more tart than sweet, and absolutely delicious!