It's Berry Pickin Time!

The dewberries are starting to ripen!

If you don't know what a dewberry is, it is the country bumpkin cousin of the blackberry. While blackberries are fancy, and expensive, and come in cute little plastic containers at the grocery store, dewberries grow wild along railroad tracks and in fields. They aren't fancy or expensive, (free if you don't mind working for them) or come in cute plastic containers ( well ours was cute... it was a leftover Easter bucket), but they are just as yummy as their fancy-shmancy cousin.

So since it is dewberry season I had to gather the family and go get some! I was guaranteed lots of berries because I had convinced my children that berry picking was sooooooo much fun that they wouldn't want to miss it. Of course I failed to mention the heat, the stickers on the plants, or the occasional snake that likes to hang out in berry patches, so we set out with high hopes. I lost one half of my berry picking team when hubs and Trey decided that mowing and doing tractor stuff was much more manly imperative than filling our buckets with berries. Here are some pictures of them being manly productive.








Ciara and I struck out on our own. I have to say it was pretty slim pickins! There were a lot of red ones but not too many ripe ones. Here is what little we did find.



I may or may not have eaten half of these berries after the picture was taken. Suffice to say we came home with very few berries.

However, after celebrating Mothers Day at my moms house with all of my wonderful kids, my husband spotted some berry bushes in an undeveloped field on the way home. And since we had our rubber boots and coffee cans in the back of the car we decided to stop.

I know......"You might be a redneck if....you keep rubber boots and coffee cans in the back of your car.... Anyhoo....

We hit the mother load! Look at all the yummy berries we brought home:



So today I made this:



Dewberry Jelly! Now before you go and get all impressed with my homemaking skills, this is supposed to be jelly, but it is more like dewberry syrup. It looks like I will have to re-do this batch to make it into jelly. I hate it when that happens! Oh well, there are still a few more weeks of dewberry season we will just have to go out and get some more.

Oh this last picture is specifically for my sister-in-law. Debbie I know you live in a parallel universe that doesn't get high speed Internet, but I hope you can get this picture. Remember those grape vines you guys planted all those years ago?



Look Grapes!!! The vines look pretty pitiful, and I don't think we will be having a grape stomp anytime soon, but I thought they were pretty cool!