Blackberry Salsa?

Blackberries. That is what likes this land. Well, that and foxes. But mostly blackberries. By the hand full, by the basket full and in the preserve jar full. The wild blackberries on the edge of the forest seem to have mated with my domestic bushes last year and I now have seven foot tall not quite wild but, perhaps, barbaric blackberries lining the back of the chicken coop. They are bigger of berry and easier to pick than straight wilds, but more tart than most of the domestics. The bug eaten berries even make great free chicken feed. The chickens now group up against the fence of the run and beg the whole time my daughters and I are picking. I just started some cuttings in the hopes of a new blackberry run starting next year.

As for the other berry bushes, well… the blackberries look great. The raspberries keep stunting. I get a bunch of new growth one year and that dies back and new growth pops up the next. The blueberries get too much sun but, really, we just don’t have that much shade on this hill. And where there is shade, there are deer…

The garden, the ever expanding garden, my forest of tomatoes… that’s doing well. We are going to need some more interesting recipes for spaghetti squash. And salsa. And ketchup. And tomatoes juice. And bloody Marys. And anything else we can make with tomatoes.

The garden was set up to be tilled early in spring. I plotted it out thinking of tilling. I fenced it up remembering last year and the attack of the fresh-dirt-digging chickens. Everything was ready. But I couldn’t get the tiller running. I got two stuttering, hard fought, start and stop passes and then, nothing. So, late in the spring I decided to hand dig a small portion of it by hand. Then dug some more, then some more. Then, it seemed, everywhere I went I wound up getting free tomato plants. So I dug more. Finally, the garden managed to get about four-fifths the size I had planned to till. All dug and broken by hand. We are composting directly into the last, unplanned, section of the garden in hopes of fixing the tiller for next year. But even that is being encroached on by four sugar baby watermelons that are taking over any space they can find.

While I don’t think we are in much danger of achieving self-sufficiency and I don’t think Bloom is in any danger of loosing our business, it seems a step in the right direction.

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~ by rjw on 07/04/2011.