dewberries

Sunday afternoon Carl called me on his way to a funeral and said, “The dewberries are ready. We need to go pick.” Can I just say, this is the worst possible week of the year for the dewberries to be ready?

We have about a 2-3 week window of picking dewberries each year. We try to pick enough to make jam to eat and give as gifts, to make cobbler filling and to freeze to eat with yogurt and put in smoothies. Fortunately, we are only on week one so if we don’t get lots picked we still have another week or two left.

We, as in those of us not in The Sound of Music (or helping with costuming),  have picked 9 pounds already which is about 2.5 gallons.

The cool thing about dewberries is that they’re just wild blackberries. They are not as big as blackberries and they have thorns BUT all we have to do is go pick them. Totally worth it. Even this year as we enter our third year of drought there’s dewberries. They’re not as plump as they have been in years past when we’ve had adequate rain, but for jam making they’re great. We also take the ones that are really dry and finish drying them out to make a tea.

So, I’ll start keeping track of our harvest and preserving in the sidebar of the blog for the spring and summer.

Do you do any foraging? If so, what do you forage?

This post is shared at Barn Hop, Backyard Farming Connection,

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