Blackberry and Apple

My hands are still scratched for yesterday but it was worth it.  One of those days where you work hard for the customer, pruning, cutting out blackberries, mowing, strimming, weeding the patio, the lot. 

We started at the back.  Usually we start at the end nearest the house, but this time we went back to the two Bramleys to the rear.  How often I have seen trees like these in the former family homes of outer suburbia.  Old, mossy, decaying in places but still bearing fruit.  Some enterprising people have a scheme to collect and sell them on, or to make cider.  These apples had rotted in the long grass.  I hate seeing food decay.  We took what we could.

Then on to the blackberries (see my blog of 27th August Canes in the Rain).  Overripe blackberries, swollen, rotten, falling off and staining my hands purple, dry brown blackberry canes from previous years, sturdy prickly blackberry runners making for the ground and putting out clusters of roots at their tips for next year.  Part the shrubs, track them down to the ground, cut them back.  (If we pay a return visit we shall dig them out). 

Blackberries and apples, ingredients for many a crumble, summer pudding or suet pudding wrapped in cloth, steamed to perfection and served with thick cream in the days when we knew little of cholesterol and counting calories.  The jam tasting, the slow overnight dripping through suspended muslin of strained blackberry jelly.  The sharpness of apple chutney.  Motherhood and apple pie.   Good memories.