Food From Afar

The recent addition of German Sweet Cherries to our orchard gives me pause to recall another German heritage fruit found in our orchard, blackberries. A sweet older couple, Otto and Velma Schlegel, whom we attended worship with at Dale Christian church nearly twenty years ago, gave us our start of German blackberries. Being a splendid horticulturist, they claimed the line of berries immigrated to the United States with their family, and had kept the thorned, large, sweet berry line going. The prolific disease resistant berry has been a staple in our orchard ever since.

Blackberries are generally a black or dark purple juicy fruit of various brambles (genus Rubus) of the rose family. In the botanical sense, the fruit is not really a berry, but an aggregate fruit composed of small drupelets. They are found throughout most of the world and are sometimes considered a nuisance plant, being hard to control. They form brambles, a word referring to any impenetrable thicket, but traditionally applied to blackberries. The sharp prickles, often called thorns, make the berries difficult to work with, but the sweet flavor makes it worth the effort. The first year’s growth of the stems called the primocane does not flower or produce fruit. The second-year canes, called floricanes, do not grow longer, but produce flowering laterals that yield the delicious fruit mid-summer.

Our orchard now consists of two thirty-foot rows of the prickly fruit that we manage. Annually, we cut the past year’s fruiting canes and leave only new vines which came up from the ground over the past summer. As these new fruiting canes begin to bloom, anticipation increases for the appetizing treat. Some tasty morsels ripen in late June with the bulk of the harvest around July 4th. It is not unusual to see our children’s fingers stained with blackberry juice as the berries are an irresistible indulgence. Once harvested and stored, the berries are used for cobblers, pies, and jellies throughout the remaining year.

We are grateful for the gift of the German berries several years ago. Thornless blackberries have been developed over the years that are quite tasty and much easier to cultivate. However, we continue to see the value in the old-fashioned, hardy, disease resistant, very tasty, prickly berry from the past. A few character training pokes from the thorns are a small price to pay for the delicious treats found just beyond the prickles.

~Mark