The blackberry’s time has passed. Blackberries still hang heavily on bushes but they no longer fill our hands, our bowls, our mouths. It’s not because we’ve had our fill. It’s because we know the life cycle of the berry.
When they first start bursting off bushes in late July, we can’t get enough of them. Anyone who has lived around them knows how to pick them – any tugging and a berry isn’t quite ready; it’s still mouth-puckeringly tart even if it looks perfectly ripe. The ones that slide right into your fingers with the slightest coaxing are perfect – for cereal, for cobbler, for pie, and for every snack in between.
Blackberries stain my hands every mid-summer day, and the phase lasts well into August. Actually, it depends on the orientation of a bush and its access to sunlight. Some bushes fruit a little earlier, some a little later.
Generally by the end of the month, blackberries turn a corner. They’re still sweet, oh yes. They haven’t changed. If anything, they’re even better. But everyone knows you have to be a little heartier to pluck them off and pop them in your mouth.
Why? The worms.
The advent of this phase is a deal-breaker for many berry fans. When you’re new to town and not yet savvy about this phase, you write it off, especially if you left your glasses at home. ‘Oh, maybe it’s just one berry out of every hundred,’ you tell yourself. If you like blackberries a lot, your denial can last longer. Even into the next blackberry season or three.
But at some point you face the facts: you’re either done with eating blackberries, even though there are millions on every acre, or you’re going to continue on, knowing you’re ingesting fruit fly larvae with every berry you pop in your mouth.
It’s easier to overlook when you’re picking berries and eating them right away. But everyone has gathered a huge bowl of berries for a cobbler, left them on the counter for a half-hour, and come back to see a very unappetizing sight – tiny white worms busily making their way around the deep-purple mound.
I’m sure at that moment we’ve all felt a little shock – ‘Is that what I have been eating?! Where did they come from? Why didn’t I see them before? Maybe I can wash them off and they’ll be gone.’ No, you soon realize there will be more crawling between the little drupelets, clinging tightly.
Many of us have taken the next step – carefully dissecting a berry to get a clearer idea of just how many worms are crawling in and around it. It doesn’t matter how many there are in any given berry, really. It all comes down to the big question: Are you willing to live with them or are you done with blackberry season?
Oh, to be done with blackberry season in its peak, what a travesty! I just can’t do that either. I usually go into a not-so-steely denial, popping them in as I pass bountiful bushes, yet cringing a little every time I do.
I soon move to cooked cobblers over fresh snacking. I love cobbler – for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. I can’t entirely block the worms out of my mind even though a boiling-hot cobbler shows no more signs of the little buddies. Eeesh.
Then September comes, and with it, precipitation. We all know the berries start to turn after the first rain. Sometimes the berries just aren’t the same anymore after that.
Sometimes they hold on for another week or so.
But once we’re at that point, a berry just doesn’t taste the same anymore. I’ve been wanting to pick berries for one last cobbler, but it’s not going to happen.
I must accept that the season is over.
