It kind of feels as if the blackberry harvest is getting more early every year. In my memory this was always something that was more in August or September and now the harvest is getting there in mid-summer. Or is this maybe because of my awesome bush trimming skills that let in any additional light, so the fruits have the most optimal setting to flourish and soak up the sun? Who knows, but it never hurts to say for the least.
Already a week or two ago I saw that the first blackberries were turning into their dark color, and after last sunny week these guys feel ready to rumble. Apart from making jam with all of the left overs, plucking the blackberries and putting them in the yoghurt is the easiest way of having a good use of them. And it is also a good money saver, because here in the Netherlands a package of blackberries op around 200 grams will cost you like 4 to 5 bucks. Crazy when you think about it, but these fruits are fragile and need to be hand harvested.
You can see that the fruits are not at all ready at the same time, as now they are multi colored. The ripe ones should easily release from the bunch without that much of an effort, that is when they are sweet and edible. So it is a bit of a search and walking by all of the bushes to find the right ones. Also with the heavy rain from the last couple of days the bushes have collapsed a bit which brings in new kinds of issues.
And there they are again, those fat slugs
Unbelievable with how many they are on the move on a moisty evening. Because during my lap for the blackberries what I also found was a tremendous amount of slugs. And that normally I don’t want slugs to eat my allotment, I also don’t want the slugs nibbling on the fruits because they bring in all kinds of parasites. Yuck!
And it is such a pity, because when looking at a slug in detail it really is a beautiful creature texture wise as you can see.
But this whole setting is not what I want to be seeing. These guys devouring on my favorite bush, wreaking more havoc yet again in this already sucky food-growing season. I went for a little run on collecting them, and in I guess like two minutes I had collected 25 of these fat suckers and tossed them waaay far out. In the allotment I tried with these beer traps and planting stinky herbs to chase them away, but this hangout underneath the blackberry bushes might be a bit too much of a challenge.
So hopefully it will be more dryer and sunnier again so these slugs go back into the bushes where they had came from. These blackberries are way too precious to just loose all of them to the rest of nature. Taking a bit of some measures to try and prevent them from all getting eaten is not too much to ask for.
Because damn…..they are sweet and good!!!