Hello everyone I am recording this in the evening. It's nice and cool. I hope you're doing well. We're talking today about growing blackberries for our fruitful harvest. I have a really cool memory of growing them as a kid, not growing them, foraging for them.

I would always go up to my great uncle and great aunt's house in Chico California and they had land that overlooked a creek, and they also had the other

side of the creek. They had the plot on the other side. And so in a sense, you didn't own the creek,

but you could kind of run around in that creek and do whatever you

wanted so my brother and I would go up we'd go north of the creek there'd be

massive, massive stands of blackberries, wild ones that we would get crazy

about and just pick.

We cut ourselves up because they were not thornless

and then we'd go leave them on the counter

and we go back in the creek and try to catch tadpoles

and frogs and things like that. And then we'd come back and my great aunt would have a blackberry pie or blackberry

cobbler waiting for us which is like such a classic memory as a kid and you know now that

I'm here at the homestead I'm really excited to get

into growing some of these more perennial style fruits so let's talk about

blackberry blackberry is rubis fruiticosis and it's a shrub. It's native to many

regions of the northern hemisphere and of course it is absolutely delicious. So let's talk about it.

It's kind of interesting because it doesn't really grow like a lot of other fruits. It's a cane plant. So new canes, those are called primocanes. They grow every year up to about 16 to 20 feet in length but they do not produce

fruit. Their second year, which they are now called florocanes, they will produce lateral growth off of the cane, which then provides

fruit. Now the fruit isn't even actually a fruit. It's a collection of 75 to 85 little individual fruits called droplets which are clustered

together to form the whole blackberry so you call it a blackberry it's

actually every little one of those little balls is the fruit itself but that's just a

botanical thing in the world of the kitchen in the world of human beings we think of

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