Blackberries

This is blackberry season.  I have some named thornless cultivar bushes that have never really taken off (Navajos and Ouachitas).  Their berries are decent, but I planted them on a bank that I think had been very compacted... I remember when I first planted them it was like cutting clay for making pots.  So they haven't spread out into the 30' long thicket along the bank that I envisaged.  They put out one or two canes per year, and my harvest has remained small.  Interestingly, the deer seem to leave them alone.  I don't seem to have any predation when the berries ripen.  I do occasionally find stink bugs on them, and biting into a stink bug-fouled berry is not a good experience. :-(

Wild blackberries, in my experience, are a chancy thing.  Some produce very good berries, I've learned.  The ones in the photo at right are growing right along the road not far from my house.  I've been picking a few each day for a couple of weeks; nobody else seems interested in them.  The berries are varied in size but some are reasonably large.  They're sweet with a bit of a bitter aftertaste.  Ones growing in a corner of my garden--I let them go last year to see how they would turn out--aren't so good.  Ditto a small collection of canes that sprouted up near the corner of my garage last year.  This year they are producing berries that are small and mostly bitter.

I'm thinking I'd like to get cuttings off of some of the roadside canes.  There are plenty of first-year canes available.  As you probably know, blackberries are biennial--this year's new sprouts produce flowers and berries next year, then they shut down.  So if one sprouts somewhere, it takes over a year to find out if it'll be any good.

And the thorns...I've been stuck multiple times in the last couple of weeks.  Tonight I was pulling berries from another thicket on my property along the woods and a six-foot first-year cane snagged on the back of my shirt.  That was not so good.  I couldn't see it and couldn't get it off me for a minute.  I think I damaged it in the process, alas--that collection of bushes is also producing berries worth eating.

What do I do with them?  So far I just eat them fresh.  I tried canning some store-bought ones one year in syrup, and that was okay but not great.  I don't like dehydrating them.  In my limited repertoire, that leaves freezing or making preserves as the remaining alternatives.  So far I haven't done either.