Berry picking

I used to have my own berry patch. At the house in Alaska, there were salmonberry bushes right outside my kitchen door and I had only to go out with my berry bucket every morning to pick whatever was ripe. I would wash them and put them in a baggie in the freezer until I had enough to make a batch of salmonberry jelly – my favorite. (Of course I’d have to get there before Father Jerry, the priest in the Catholic Church that was just downhill from my house and my bushes. He liked to pick them for his morning cereal. Not that he didn’t appreciate the jelly I made as well!)

But here in Washington, I don’t have a garden yet, or even a patch of ground. I see a lot of berries on public lots and along trails – are THOSE berries OK to pick on a large scale? I don’t know, so I don’t. (Besides, my grandmother’s berry bucket is in a box in storage somewhere and it just wouldn’t be the same without it.)

Anyway, I’ve been seeing salmonberries along the trails we’ve hiked on recently and it got me to thinking about berry picking times. When we first moved to Alaska, we lived ‘out the road’ on Wrangell Island. (There was only ‘in town’ and ‘out the road’ as possibilities of where to be on an island with only 10 miles of paved road!) Behind the house we were renting (when we first moved there) were blueberry bushes. I’d put Todd in the baby carrier on my back and out we’d go with a bucket to collect blueberries. He’d sit in his little seat and peer carefully into the bushes and then point his little finger. “I see a blueberry” he’d say until I found and picked exactly the one he was pointing to among the hundreds of possibilities. Then he’d look for another one.

We found out pretty quickly that all those berries were likely to have worms in them. We were surprised – appalled, really – but the old-timers knew that was inevitable and just soaked the berries in salted water to bring out the worms before they ate them The lesson there was – don’t eat while you pick! (Unless you don’t mind a little extra protein.)

Friends of ours used to take their dog with them when they picked blueberries, hoping that the dog would act as an early warning system for bears which, of course, were also out there picking berries. This only works if you actually pay attention to the dog, but our friends would invariably yell at him to stop barking or whining, forgetting why he was there as they concentrated on particularly productive berry bushes. The dog would finally beat his own hasty retreat back home to let his ‘people’ work out the division of berries with the bear on their own. Idiots, he’d think, I’m sure. HE wasn’t taking the chance!

We spent more happy hours in Alaska poking around old ‘clear-cut’ areas picking berries than I could have counted. We were always on the lookout for bears, and saw a lot of ‘stump bears’ – but not many of the real thing. (Stump bears, for the uninitiated, are tree stumps that stick up in a clear-cut area and look like they might be bears to those of us who are timid about bumping noses with a bear and who have an active imagination.) Berry bushes are among the first things to fill in a clear-cut so they were popular with all berry seekers, two- and four-legged varieties.

My dad was a champion berry picker, mostly because he never met a blueberry pie he didn’t love. Motivation! He and my mother would be out there with Todd and I and we’d all have to hold up our buckets to compare results every so often – neither he nor Todd wanted to fall short of the average. Many were the times my mother or I would have to give up some of our own to even things out - or catch up.

There is something lacking about just buying berries at the store. So if we ever do manage to get a house here, I think berries would be a great thing to plant. I can’t wait!