Blackberry Bonanza

You may have noticed that I twice mentioned picking blackberries in the past week. I'm not talking the cell phone-PDA kind of blackberry, either. We're talking good old-fashioned, pick-by-the-side-of-the-road beauties like the ones my grandmother made into countless pies and jams every summer of my childhood. The Pacific Northwest has a love-hate relationship with these delicious but invasive berries, as I read about on the New York Times dining pages.

We found some on Bainbridge Island at Fay Bainbridge State Park; in fact we went looking for them there because Emily read about them online. We picked over the bunch that were accessible on the beach, but we saw that the road we drove back on was lined with them. It was hard not to pull over and join the fellow-pickers we saw, but we had enough for a cobbler and had a ferry to catch.

We saw more berries on our walk down to the Arboretum and Japanese Garden along Lake Washington Boulevard, but we didn't have an appropriate bag to transport them home in. Sigh. But the next day, we chanced upon the mother load at Seward Park, and did have an extra grocery bag with us.

Though we were exhausted, hungry and scratched, we picked and picked until the bag was starting to rip under it's weight.

And even then, we were not truly deterred until we saw this warning sign posted: Poison Oak.

For those of you willing to brave the poisonous plants and potentially poisonous pesticides, I found a Pacific Northwest wild berry primer. Go forth and forage; you don't even need to leave the city.