Saturday was a pleasantly mild day with some longish sunny spells but the breeze was a bit on the blustery side. By early afternoon when we visited the plot it was hard to imagine that it had rained heavily on Friday as the sun and wind had already dried out the ground.
Now we have one patch on our allotment that to put it mildly is in need of a tidy up. It’s not an area of the plot that we tend to take too many photographs of but the picture below shows this patch at the beginning of May this year.
It’s an area where “stuff” was dumped as various plot were cleared over the years. There is a large elderberry and Jostaberry bush growing almost wild and a bed of comfrey grows well here supplying leaves for the compost heap and plenty of flowers for the bees. You can just about make out some bluebells in flower too. Then there are the weeds, couch grass, docks, nettles and thistles all growing unchecked. Over the years a wild blackberry bush has become established and by this time of the year it has almost taken over this patch using the Jostaberry and elderberry as support. Without us paying any attention to it over the years it is producing a bumper crop of blackberries.
They’re not poor quality either but large pest free berries and as I said lots of them. The downside is that picking them comes at a price as the berries are protected by some wicked thorns but the temptation to reach that little bit further into the middle of the thicket to reach a particular large ripe juicy berry cannot be resisted.
By the time we’d finished picking we’d managed to harvest just over 1kg of fruit. There’s still lots of fruit to come and plenty left for the blackbirds who will be able to reach some of the ripe berries we couldn’t reach. The middle punnet above contains the easy pickings from our thornless variety Loch Ness and the two larger punnets on either side our unexpected pickings from our wild blackberry bush.
So our overgrown area of plot in desperate need of renovation is producing an excellent crop of berries. Exactly how I renovate this may be governed by our wild blackberry.
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Great harvest of blackberries! The thornless seemed to produce less berries but maybe easier to pick.
ReplyDeleteWe've picked 1.3kg from our thornless variety in small amounts since the 20 July about the same amount as we picked from our wild bush in one go. The size of the two plants doesn't compare though as the wild one is very large and totally out of control so in our case it's not a fair comparison. I can certainly confirm the thornless are easier to pick. There's no time spent removing thorns from fingers at all!
DeleteA brilliant blackberry harvest. That's £10 at Tesco.
ReplyDeleteAsda are charging £8.33/kg but to you £10.00. Seriously though I think growing some fruit on the plot is the easiest way of covering allotment costs.
DeleteDo badgers like blackberries or do they just stick to sweetcorn?