Berry Picking

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So what do you all think of berry picking?

I went berry picking for the first time last weekend in my neighborhood. I loved it! I wish I would have done it years ago!

Oregon has some of the finest marionberries around. Conveniently, there is a marionberry bush that grows outside my house.

I have a couple of trays of them frozen in my freezer, and I hope to make something savory with them. I am thinking about making some marionberry ice cream along with a jar's worth of jam!

All that said, what are your experiences with berry picking?

I have done it many times since a child as I grew up on smallholdings. Is more of a chore where one ends up eating as one picks to prevent boredom stepping in. Pocket money was an incentive back then. Last week I helped pick a few peas and I shelled the odd few a day ago. Not many.

I have not heard of the berries you have picked. In a month we will get the blackberries out. It does help to look at the views when resting.

Marionberries are very similar to blackberries, though I understand that blackberries have bigger pits.

I can understand how you may call berry picking a chore. It gets tricky after a while. The hot sun doesn't help, but I remembered sunscreen.

As for eating them while I pick, I know that all too well. I even feel like a bear when I do it!

Haha. Used to have a dog that when I took him for walks, I would sit in a hedge and eat blackberries and give him some as well and he liked them. He soon learned how to pick his own. The only problem is he would sometimes eat parts of the prickly stalks as well. He did not seem to mind!

My blackberry season is over.It was a good one with huge sweet berries.I grow triple crown thornless.They make really long canes.
Years ago I had a Doberman that would go berry picking and he would eat the ripe berries.
Now it’s time to pick elderberries but not such a good crop this year.
I also have black cap raspberries, wine berries and blueberries.

I grew up on a farm, so I did it a lot as a child. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, currants (that's the word google translate gave me, dunno if it's correct), raspberries...

As a child it was pretty fun; an easy chore that any of us kids were able to do, not to mention it was easier for us than the adults since we didn't have to crouch down so much 'cause we were small. This was the case especially with the strawberries.

Now that I'm an adult, I no longer live in the countryside, so chances to pick berries are rarer. My parents don't have that big field of strawberries anymore, either. Picking currants is something I still do if I visit my parents at the right time of the year; it's easy since I can pick them from the bushes without crouching down and can be in my own thoughts while doing so. Last summer I went to the nearby woods to pick blueberries and was squatting down or kneeling pretty much the whole time, so my legs were aching for days afterwards since I'm not used to that kind of stuff, but it was kinda worth it.

My family goes blueberry picking every August. We generally try to pick around 100 lbs or so to freeze for winter use. They're so cheap this time of year.

I went blackberry picking with my mom at least a few times when I was little. I don't know where we went but I think it was some wild area that did not belong to anybody. Berry picking might be great to do now that I'm in a serious long-term relationship thanx to the Berry Picking Time song by Great Big Sea giving me the idea

There used to be fields where I used to live where lots of wild blueberries would grow and my mother and other people would go pick them. But the other day my mother told those fields are now overgrown with trees.

When I was a kid there was a frog pond near my house, and I would find lots of blackberries growing near the pond. But the pond dried up years ago and now the whole place is just bushes and trees.

Nature really changes everything, and often you don't even notice it.

Never heard of a marrionberry. Googled. Aaah, it's a cross between a couple other strains of blackberries. We have blackberries growing wild all over - I stop and pick a handful when they're ripe here and there, sometimes at the beach, sometimes a few blocks from home or at the edge of a parking lot wherever I am. We used to go pick buckets full of them for jam and pies etc when we were kids.

There are also tonnes of blueberry farms right around me. Some strawberry ones, too. And drive 25 minutes and there are tonnes of cranberry fields, too. I've never done commercial picking, but I have gone to a "u-pick," farm before to pick strawberries. (cheaper by the lb if you pick your own.)

It's Ok. I almost never do it these days. Most people don't want to do the work because it's long days in the Sun for low pay. The majority of berry picking farm labour around here are senior citizens from the Punjabi Sikh community. Their labour contractors take them to the fields in school busses and they pick berries all day in order to have something to do while contributing financially to their households. Plus most of the Indian community here comes from the farming region of Punjab, so it's in their blood to work the Earth - and it's valuable work, people need food. (Tonnes of cars driving around here with "No Farmers No Food," decals in support of the farmers' protests in India - possibly the largest protest in the history of the world.)

When my mom was a kid here, they picked berries for an after school job when they were ~10-14 or whatever. Make a few dollars etc. Almost no young people do that these days.. lazy + the piece rate pay is far lower than minimum wage and life is extremely expensive here so parents push their kids to at Least earn minimum wage and aim for higher pay ASAP. Understandable economics, but it's a shame people don't do truly valuable work of food harvesting because they can't earn enough money at it. Indian seniors, Mexican migrant labour.. and automation - I saw 2 blueberry picking machines driving down a highway between fields in the last week.

If there woulda been a frog pond where me & my mom would pick blackberries, I woulda been trying to catch frogs & toads instead of doing any actual picking. I never like eating berries so I never had much interest in berries. Trying to catch bugs & other small animals was about the only thing I liked to do outside as a kid. I used to catch LOTS of frogs & toads at home in the evening when I was little but I saw very little there as an adult. My parents are not really more built up or anything in the area than when I was a kid & my parents probably have even more gardens & plants & places for them to hide & catch bugs & dad put in a couple water gardens when I was in my teens. I hear the frog & toad population in general has rapidly declined over the last couple decades Climate change is probably a factor.

We used to pick blackberries from the local farm shop when I was a kid. We were given a basket and we would pick our own. It was fun.

I've posted the story of when I picked blueberries numerous times, so I'm not going to post it again.