Meager Harvest

One of the things I like best about where I live is that three minutes' walk from the house leads you to a creek and a path by the creek, where there are several hundred linear feet of blackberry canes. These are mostly what my mother called "Himalaya Blackberries," and when they are plump and ripe and sweet they are absolutely delicious. The best way to pick them is to choose the ones that are fattest and blackest and that come off with barely a tug. If you have to pull to the point where the cane moves more than a quarter-inch, that berry isn't ripe enough yet.

Every year since I've lived here (this is summer number six), I've been able to harvest -- on good days -- six to eight cups of berries, perfect for a pie or cobbler or crisp. (I like a blackberry-peach crisp -- very easy and quite delicious, especially hot, with vanilla ice cream.) Most days I'd just grab a cup or so to have with breakfast or to make a berry shake.

But so far this year, a cup's worth of berries has been my biggest haul. Here's what I was able to pull in this morning, even expanding my foraging to areas I don't usually have to explore to meet my quota:

As you can see, pretty pitiful. I even needed to pluck some marginal berries just to get this many. (Sometimes a berry is plump and ripe, except for one drupelet --berries being drupes, the individual elements of the fruit are called drupelets. So I pick them, then at home remove the offending drupelet which was causing it to cling to its cane.) I don't know whether it was the big rains this winter, or the extra hot weather we've had (these sorts of berries thrived in the cool climate of my Humboldt County birthplace, so it's entirely possible they hate the heat), but the harvest just isn't there. Maybe it's just one more sign of global climate change.