About those black raspberries: They grow like weeds in my neighborhood (and some of my more idiotic neighbors actually consider them to be weeds). They serve as my bait to get me out jogging regularly at least one month out of the year.
This year, they're ripe about a month early, and they're plumper, juicier, and sweeter than ever before.
Today I happened upon a particularly thick thicket of them, so I decided to sacrifice my shirt, doing the hold-up-your-t-shirt-like-a-bucket trick to bring home a load of them. My shirt will probably never be quite the same; I'm hoping that purple berry stains aren't wildly noticeable on a dark maroon t-shirt. At my friend Katrina's suggestion, I'm infusing them in a big old bottle of vodka (the kind you get in a plastic bottle at the grocery store for $9). Come visit in about a month (I guess I am an optimist!) and help me toast the kitchen's completion with blackberry cosmos!
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A secret from your berry-laden Oregon friends: pour forceful boiling water on the berry stains to get them out. My mother always said cold water for stains, but I saw it work with my very own eyes.
ReplyDelete--Martha
p.s. please make sure you're not wearing the shirt at the time.
Well, I keep trying to find out the difference, and nobody seems to have a definitive answer. Are there any horticulturists out there who are ready to weigh in? Do you need a super-close-up picture of something?
ReplyDeleteMartha, you're being confused with jail fodder!
In my youth I was teased by being called Martha Washington (not helped by the fact that alphabetically I was always seated next to a boy named George), and life seems not to have improved as an adult.
ReplyDeleteLet it be understood by all that I bear no resemblance to either personage.
Blackberry, raspberry, black raspberry. What's the difference? The names seem to be used with abandon to describe plants with fruit ranging from purple, orange, amber, pale-yellow and red to black. I'd always thought that raspberries had red fruit and blackberries had black fruit and that was that. But, I find that this isn't actually the case.
ReplyDeleteThe difference lies, not in the color of the berry, but in the way it is connected to the receptacle. When ripe, raspberries separate from their receptacles (the central knob or core), producing a hollow core and blackberries and other dewberries don't; the core is part of the ripe fruit. There are also differences in the cane, which we'll get in to a bit later
Hi Erin, Forgot to weigh in on the black raspberry question. Those are definitely raspberries. The blackberries that they grow in WA and OR and elongated berries 3/4 - 1 inch long, raspberries are round.
ReplyDeleteBoth are good to eat!
Mom