blackberries!

[kaberett]

This evening's date activity was "go on a stupid little walk for our stupid mental health" with a secondary quest of Fruit.

We achieved: probably around a kilo of blackberries? I need to weigh them still; a visit to the plum trees, which need another week or so; and a quick check on the quince, which is Definitely A Quince and has Many Fruit.

In the course of all of this I wound up explaining to Adam that There Are (Roughly) Two Kinds Of Blackberries growing wild hereabouts (with various closely-related crossbreeds): the big fat juicy ones that really do want to be about ready to drop off the canes before they're at Optimum Flavour, and the smaller chewier tougher ones with a more complex flavour. The allotment mostly has the former; the fields out around the back mostly have the latter, so A had to do lots of taste-testing to recalibrate How Ripe Was Acceptably Ripe For Harvest. And then, in an idle attempt to establish whether "bramble jelly" versus "blackberry jelly" is regionalism for the same thing or meaningfully drawing some kind of distinction between wild and cultivated, I learned... that blackberry genetics are More Of A Mess Than That. To the point that they're just an aggregate species. Microspecies! They're all microspecies! I am delighted!

Comments

[lunabee34]

What delicious research.

[kaberett]

very :D

[ceb]

I keep being too disorganised to steal shoots from friends' tasty blackberries. Our garden somehow has the worst sort, which grow endless thorny brambles but are really rubbish at the blackberry bit. There were several years where they put all their energy into climbing trees, then producing hanging brambles to trap the unwary, and almost forgot to produce any fruit...

[kaberett]

Oh nooooo. That is TERRIBLE. Yes, stealing bits to (hopefully) outcompete sounds like The Way To Go...

[taimatsu]

Our garden has masses of (what turns out to be) Rubus laciniatus and it’s really interesting how different the leaves, stems and fruits are from blackberries growing wild on streets nearby.