Blackberries and Red Bugs.

The last post ended with Mother's Day.  Now, about a month later we are at Father's Day.  The weather has dried out considerably.  My zero-turn mower skills have improved drastically but now instead of avoiding a slide down a wet, slippery slope and rolling over I am maneuvering through giant clouds of dust.   When I take my shower after mowing I am reminded of when my brother and I were little kids and Mom would declare she could grow potatoes in the dirt in our ears.

For weeks now I had been doing battle with some of the sharpest-thorned vegetation I had ever encountered.  There were dense patches of long, six to 10 feet, stalks.  The stalks were green where the growth was new and brown and woody for the previous seasons growth.  Most of these brier patches had added three feet to their height between when I started mowing in mid-April and late-May.  To mow the border between the manicured part of the campground and the natural woods required the wearing of lots of leather.  Any skin or cloth left exposed would be snagged and ripped by thousands of tiny, sharper than a razor thorns.  Before I started getting properly covered I came home bloodied up on my hands and arms.  And this stuff was growing like a weed all over the place.  I was worried it was going to take over the campground and smother the landscape.  It got to where I was using the weed eater before mowing so that I could push back the encroachment and avoid being snagged and die a death of a thousand cuts.

Then one day this "weed" put on blooms.  Thousands upon thousands of tiny white blossoms were all over the park.  These blooming plants were almost always at the border between the landscaped ground and natural woods.  They also seemed to be concentrated around the upper rims of drainage culverts.  It was only a few days more that tiny red berries became visible.  I wondered if this was another of those berries that the birds would eat but are poisonous to humans.  As the days went by the berries got bigger and darker and I finally asked the park naturalist if she knew what the vicious bush with the red berries was.  Looking at me with some amusement she said; "Wild Blackberries".  "Well, duh, of course they are.  I knew that." I said as I turned away to hide my red face.  Geez, I had been whacking and using herbicide on untold numbers of these things for weeks, I hope nobody takes issue with it.

The blackberries are doing extremely well, at least the ones I haven't killed.

A short time later everything started ripening up and it was time to start picking blackberries and putting them on our morning cereal, fresh off the bush.  But with my first picking I found a new nemesis.  I knew to look for snakes, actually I was hoping to find one.  I knew that the thorns were to be watched out for but it was what I didn't know to expect that got me....chiggers!  The weather had turned hot and dry and we were in T-shirts, shorts and sandals all day every day.  When I waded into those berry bushes I must have looked like a giant "Fresh Meat" sign.  Within hours of picking our first quart of berries my legs, hips and belt-line were covered in the bright red bore holes of those insidious little red bugs.  The itching was so intense I wanted to skin myself.

It took weeks and lots of Chigger-Eze anti-itch cream before the effects of those little monsters wore off, although I look like I have giant purple freckles all over me that are the scars from the damage they did.  After that first picking experience I have since developed a 'picking protocol'.  I now put on long sleeves, long pants, socks and lace-up boots.  But before putting any of that on, I spray my lower legs, feet, hands and forearms with DEET.  Then the socks go on and they get sprayed.  Then the pants, boots and shirt go on and they get sprayed.  Haven't been bit since.

The berries lasted into early July so we had a pretty good stretch of time that we did not buy strawberries for our cereal.  If we had freezer capacity we could have easily put up enough berries to last the rest of the year.