Give me a man with a long reach, size-13 stompin' boots, and a high threshold of pain, and I'll give you a blackberry pie. I won't do it for less.
Western Oregon has a climate exquisitely suited for readers, writers and blackberries, but the blackberries are the most successful. One of the easiest ways to spot a newcomer is if she spots a sprig of what she hopes is a blackberry vine in her back yard and gets all excited. "You don't want that," I explain as forcefully as I can, which is to say with a spade and a canister of napalm.
Oh, but they do want that. And so every year, in exchange for permission to exterminate the sprig, I take the newcomers out to a spot--any spot--out of town where the blackberries romp and gallop over the landscape like radio hosts talking over a reasonable man. You can find acres of them in any direction. If they are allowed to root in the neighborhood, however, it is a matter of a few weeks before they have vaulted the fences and arched over your house. You'll be putting in one last comment on your Facebook page, oblivious to the creeping darkness, and that will be that: it's 9-1-1, and send in the goats.
According to the OSU Agriculture Extension Service, there are two thornless varieties. They are located in Sasquatch's back yard under a thick mulch of leprechaun poo. The rest of them are violent and sneaky and no fun to pick, but they can be tamed into a delectable pie, and every year I haul out the buckets and tell Dave to suit up and off we go. The juice gets all over everything, but it does mask the blood.
It was only this year, as we played the par-three eensy-beensy golf course at McMenamin's Edgefield Manor, a sprawling brewery and resort guarded by attack blackberries, that it came to us how to make Operation Pie more enjoyable. The par-three is the only course I'm allowed to play on, because I can't count high enough to play the others. Each hole is encircled by a blather of blackberries which are chopped back on the hour by the grounds crew, and community-minded citizens from all over plant their golf balls in them in preparation for the winter ball harvest. Because of the aforementioned high threshold of pain, we usually come off the course with a few more balls than we came with, but it never occurred to us until this year that we could come for the blackberries.
The establishment is fine with the idea. You, little man or woman, are no threat to their incidental blackberry crop. Neither is your army. Not even if you're a goat. You may pick all day from clumps of berries at a comfortable shoulder height, if you wish, and then you can have a beer. And then you can go home and make pies.
Blackberries are found in a number of items, including cobblers, pandowdies, slumps, grunts and flummeries. (They are particularly prevalent in bear grunts.) Pies are my choice, even though pie dough tests my own threshold of pain. There are only five ingredients in a pie filling; my tradition is to leave one of them out. That is what the slits in the top crust are for: you slide the butter pats through them.
At least now the picking part has gotten easier. Just drive on up to Edgefield, and whatever you do, don't park too close to the berries.
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Oh. Yum. But what really caught my eye is the little Blue Willow plate holding the butter!
ReplyDeleteUp here in Washington state, I well remember my first visit here in August. I was thrilled that I found some blackberries on a walk, just like you said here. Now I live in a complex with one side of our area completely taken over by blackberry bushes. And yes I do pick some, but mostly I leave it to others to get pricked and bloodied. Yesterday I had a sample of some blackberry buckle that melted in my mouth!
ReplyDeleteWhat a fun article. Reminds me of my childhood when my mom would hand me a little pail and send me ,gloveless and dressed in shorts and T-shirt,to the neighboring berry patch. I came back covered in red and purple, including my tongue,with enough berries for a cobbler.
ReplyDeleteAnd you forgot that bears have'em in both their grunts and dumps.
The Washington Post ran an article recently about people who pick berries in public. Seems that every year about mid-summer, several huge black- and mul-berry bushes mysteriously sprout forth.....**next to the on-ramp for Key Bridge, over in Arlington, VA**. Anyway, it was a rather lengthy "human-interest" story, which noted that all of the people who showed up to pick the free berries were, um, "not originally from the U.S.". In other words, the author found it amusingly quaint that only people like a gal from Iran or a guy from Mexico would be found harvesting free fruit.
ReplyDeleteIt sounded to me like a fun thing to do. But then I realized that anyone spotted picking berries next to the on-ramp to Key Bridge would probably risk being arrested after some high-falutin' yuppie lawyer in a BMW placed an alarming phone call to the local US Park Police.
So, I just continue to buy my pies at the local Harris-Teeter food store. The greatest risk with that is having to hear James complain about the poor quality of ingredients that go into making the crust.....
Wonderful piece. I'll check out Sasquatch's crop the next time I drop in for a visit.
ReplyDeleteA pandowdie? flummery? grunt? you talk funny but that pie shure looks tasty!
ReplyDeleteHere in Canada we get blackberries in these tiny little 1/4lb containers at the grocery store for about $6. I guess the money is worth it, eh? (added stereotype for all y'all's benefit, teehee)
ReplyDeleteI raise blackberries and thistles on my farm, they're my main crop ... at least, that's what I tell city folk that see the mess that has invaded every fence-line and threatens to run you over if you stand still too long. It may not grow as fast as kudzu, but it does sneak up on you...
ReplyDeleteI miss blackberries! My favorite was cobbler. I have volunteer raspberries trying to take over my lawn. They are just as pernicious as blackberry canes but don't grow quite as fast as they would in Oregon. Drier climate and all that.
ReplyDeleteI suspect you'd have a higher success rate (or at least less trepidation) if you did things beer first, berry-picking second.
ReplyDeleteAnd speaking of goats, here's a neat little story from my part of MD: about five years ago, a cadre of goats was recruited to mitigate the spread of invasives overtaking Sligo Creek. Of course it worked like a charm, until the overzealous ungulates started chomping away at the native plants. So, the shepherds began toting Nerf squirt guns (naturally) and blasting the unfortunate creatures when they nibbled on the wrong foliage.
The world is so much more interesting when we combat our problems with creativity rather than chemicals (unless said chemical is beer.)
A blackberry cobbler or crisp: Yum-E!
ReplyDelete(You should drop by my blog because there is something eerie going on.)
What is worse is when a negligent neighbor blithely allows blackberries to sprout in their back yard; which then poke through, under and around the fence into MY yard!.
ReplyDeleteNot that I would ever do this, mine you, but I have HEARD that some people (ahem) have been known to poke their little sprayer loaded with high octane "Roundup" between the fence boards and waft a bit of liquid death over negligent neighbor's blackberry saplings. Can you believe someone would do such a thing??!!
If Barbara Kingsolver lived in the NW, she would have changed a bit of her dialogue in Prodigal Suumer to "Shit Aunt Lusa! The damn booger honeysuckles done et your garage!"
ReplyDeleteInstead, being from the south, she wrote honeysuckle.
It's one of my favorite lines from any book ever written.
You have blackberries, my dad in NC has kudzu. But kudzu does NOT a good cobbler make LOL!
ReplyDeleteOh, no, no! The slits in the top pie crust are for when you forget to put even a teaspoon of sugar in a cherry pie, and discover that about 15 minutes after you put it in the oven. Spoon the sugar in any way you can. If you get the right piece, not bad. If you get the wrong piece NOT good. :o)
ReplyDeleteI remember when I was a kid, my folks used to take me to where blackberry bushes ran pampant, and we'd pick "in public" to our hearts content, and nobody cared. Now that place is known as "Gresham".
ReplyDeleteAnd here on the coast, there are still places that blackberry bushes grow wild, right across the street from our apt... and the deer also love to pick and eat, and nobody bothers them.... until an overzealous developer decides to turn the bushes into a row a unwanted 3-story houses...
Oh, Willow, my tortoise Willow loves to look at her Blue Willow plates, too.
ReplyDeleteKat, that's one of my favorite lines, as well. It even gets quoted in a poem of mine--but it's not about blackberries.
Ekdowns, beware the aerial sludge that falls from an onramp atmosphere. Berries are really good at picking up pollutants, so your grocery store option is a good one (depending on where they were picked.) My solution to roadside blackberries is to be a little bit permissive to the blackberries in the backyard, and it is a battle, but so far not with the neighbors.
I tried to grow the famous Oregon Marionberries instead. (There are excellent noninvasive cultivars.) Sadly, the wild Himalayans snuffed them out, but oh are the wild ones delicious! They never get as far as the oven. Rosemary
This is a delightful piece, Murr. I was elated when I first started coming to Patagonia as a backpacker back in the '70s to find that there were blackberries growing like crazy in the mountain wilds.
ReplyDeleteBlackberry pie, on my! When I was a little boy we often vacationed in northern Michigan along with my paternal grandparents. My job was to go with Grandma Alice and pick blackberries in the wonderful woodlands that surrounded the Buckeye Rustic Resort. And then Grandma, who liked to fish but had no interest in the beach or the water, other than as a respository for bluegill, sunflish and pike, would spend the morning baking blackberry pies that were to die for.
When I actually moved down here to Patagonia 17 years ago I was even more delighted to find blackberries actually growing on and around my litte acre and a half of land, next to and often allied with the dogrose that quickly takes over and chokes any piece of open ground that the sunshine can get to. People come from the city, buy a piece of Patagonia wild and the first thing they do is get somebody to come in with oxen, chains, pickaxes and spades to pull and dig the dogrose and the blackberries out by the roots. I say, why come? Stay in the city and water the pavement if you can't stand the sight of nature. Me, I just sharpen a machete and scale it all back, just enough to let me through. Those plants fight back (and actually seem to thrive on pruning) and the blackberry is the fiercest of all, with thorns like fish hooks. But I wear my battle scars proudly, because its a worthy and invincible opponent. Anyway,thanks for sharing, Murr. A true gem, as always.
We found blackberries growing beside old steps going up into the medieval town of Rye in England. Of course Himself made every excuse to use that as our route to anywhere else so he could have a little feast. Funny to think that it was the Canadians picking them in public!
ReplyDeleteSweet post, Murr!
Thanks! To those not in the know, Marionberries were developed here in Oregon (in Marion county) and are delicious and chiefly used to put in jars and send to people in Washington, D.C., where they become hilarious.
ReplyDeleteI continue to sample blackberries, but none have come close to the wild ones around Scappoose. We'd just wander along the back roads (actually in those days all the roads out there were back roads) and pick off the easy ones, scratch-free.
ReplyDeleteOne day when I was about seven, I came home from picking blackberries near our farm at the edge of the Everglades, and told my mom that there had been a couple of black bears picking at the other end.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was cool, but in retrospect it was nowhere near as cool as mom. She smiled, said to be careful, and never mentioned it again. A few days later the neighbor brought us a bunch of bear steaks. My mom was cool, but she got stuff done.
That is very cool. I'm pretty sure my mom would have had something to say.
ReplyDeleteYes, we have some wild ones growing here on the farm, and they are nasty bastards, but so worth a little pain. Never attempted a pie though, but I imagine a big, hot piece with some ice cream on it might be worth a whole lotta pain.
ReplyDeleteI can't help you stomp. I'm a big enough guy, but I have somewhat smallish feet.
ReplyDeleteThanks! To those not in the know, Marionberries were developed here in Oregon (in Marion county) and are delicious and chiefly used to put in jars and send to people in Washington, D.C., where they become hilarious.
ReplyDeleteThis is a delightful piece, Murr. I was elated when I first started coming to Patagonia as a backpacker back in the '70s to find that there were blackberries growing like crazy in the mountain wilds.
ReplyDeleteBlackberry pie, on my! When I was a little boy we often vacationed in northern Michigan along with my paternal grandparents. My job was to go with Grandma Alice and pick blackberries in the wonderful woodlands that surrounded the Buckeye Rustic Resort. And then Grandma, who liked to fish but had no interest in the beach or the water, other than as a respository for bluegill, sunflish and pike, would spend the morning baking blackberry pies that were to die for.
When I actually moved down here to Patagonia 17 years ago I was even more delighted to find blackberries actually growing on and around my litte acre and a half of land, next to and often allied with the dogrose that quickly takes over and chokes any piece of open ground that the sunshine can get to. People come from the city, buy a piece of Patagonia wild and the first thing they do is get somebody to come in with oxen, chains, pickaxes and spades to pull and dig the dogrose and the blackberries out by the roots. I say, why come? Stay in the city and water the pavement if you can't stand the sight of nature. Me, I just sharpen a machete and scale it all back, just enough to let me through. Those plants fight back (and actually seem to thrive on pruning) and the blackberry is the fiercest of all, with thorns like fish hooks. But I wear my battle scars proudly, because its a worthy and invincible opponent. Anyway,thanks for sharing, Murr. A true gem, as always.
I remember when I was a kid, my folks used to take me to where blackberry bushes ran pampant, and we'd pick "in public" to our hearts content, and nobody cared. Now that place is known as "Gresham".
ReplyDeleteAnd here on the coast, there are still places that blackberry bushes grow wild, right across the street from our apt... and the deer also love to pick and eat, and nobody bothers them.... until an overzealous developer decides to turn the bushes into a row a unwanted 3-story houses...
If Barbara Kingsolver lived in the NW, she would have changed a bit of her dialogue in Prodigal Suumer to "Shit Aunt Lusa! The damn booger honeysuckles done et your garage!"
ReplyDeleteInstead, being from the south, she wrote honeysuckle.
It's one of my favorite lines from any book ever written.