A colleague told me about a time when she needed to chop down a thick stand of weeds at the edge of a ditch, so she took her machete and swung through the weeds, mentally giving each weed the name of person who had annoyed her: telemarketers, demanding students, annoying neighbors, and so on. This allowed her to kill two birds with one stone (or whack two weeds with one machete): she cleared the weeds while harmlessly working out her frustrations.
What names would I project on the weeds I pulled in the blackberry patch this week? Take that, telecommunications problems! Curses on you, neverending road construction project that makes me sit in traffic waiting for a flagman to let me through on two separate parts of my morning commute! I spit in your face, spring floods!
I hadn't intended to do any weeding in the blackberry patch this summer; in fact, I'd written the blackberries off as a lost cause for several good reasons: they never got properly pruned over the winter; grapevines have been colonizing the back end of the patch; and the flood that took away our driveway and garden shed dumped a pile of silt and debris on the blackberry patch. What happens to blackberry bushes that sit under five or six feet of water? I didn't particularly want to find out. Add to that a busier than normal spring and the need to move a bunch of stuff to Jackson and I pretty much pushed the blackberry patch right out of my mind.
But then the other day I was mowing and noticed the wild berries turning red on the edges of the woods--their tart, juicy goodness made me wonder whether our poor neglected blackberry patch would be producing any fruit this summer.
But I can't pick berries if I can't see 'em, so I decided to wade in and start pulling weeds, thick stands of jewelweed and joe pye weed stretching over my head. I can pull out jewelweed easily with one hand, but the bigger weeds require both hands and every ounce of strength, and then if they let loose suddenly I end up reeling backward. I saw spiders and beetles and heard buzzing bees, swatted grapevines out of the way and knocked down flood debris, and I saw plenty of dry, lifeless blackberry canes.
But I also found berries. I pulled a lot of weeds, cleared the healthiest portion of the patch, and picked two big fat blackberries, leaving many more to ripen. It may take a year or two to bring the patch back to full production, but this year we ought to have enough to make all that weeding worthwhile.
Take that, pesky weeds! Thanks for the great workout, but now it's time for you to make room for blackberries.
2 comments:
Blackberries and strawberries are the taste of summer. My Mom used to make blackberry pies and syrups and we'd eat blackberries every day while they were ripening. What a glorious pair of berries!
Yes! We've tried growing blueberries too but haven't had much success. Good thing we have good farm stands nearby.
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