Picking berries has always been one of my favourite activities. Maybe it was the association with the delicious baked treats which always followed or the jam/jelly which brought a taste of summer into the long months of winter, but picking berries never felt like work.
I started young. I remember picking cranberries with my grandmother when we visited my grandparents every Sunday. Nan made jam of course and eventually, when she had a deep freeze, she stored some there. I always picked berries with my Aunt Esther too. We went down the shore and picked along the shoreline above the cliffs for cranberries as well. I wasn’t in school when I went with Nan, older when I accompanied Esther.
Cranberries were the start of the berry picking adventures though. Over the years, with various people, I picked a variety of berries which were plentiful in Newfoundland. Those berries came from the wild, not cultivated in a well groomed field.
There were raspberries which always seemed to have wasp nests nestled among the bushes. If you came from raspberry picking without scratches, bristles in your hands or a sting, you counted yourself lucky.
Blueberries were easy to pick. You could sit among the bushes, find a spot with biggies and pick a bucketful.
We picked wild strawberries too. It was work to find patches of the berries, miniature compared to what is cultivated today. They were sweet and tasty though and worth the effort though we didn’t get many.
A small patch of blackberries in my grandparents yard was just enough for a small snack. We never saw enough of them for picking other than snacking.
Partridgeberries known as lingonberries in Scandinavia, were among the ground cover on hillsides. The tiny plants meant you moved around to pick them. They were close to the ground and didn’t ripen until September after school started. The berries are tart and apples go well with them in pies especially.
Crowberries were similarly located but along a coastline where they required back breaking work. I picked these with our neighbours, the Ralphs, who had picked them in their previous home, Flat Island, a rocky, isolated fishing village in Bonavista Bay. The crowberries went into puddings and were enjoyed throughout the winter. You can imagine in such an isolated place, nothing, not even a crowberry was wasted. My parents didn’t pick them growing up in St. John’s and surrounding area.
Then there were the berries picked from trees, such as squash berries with their flat stones which you strained out to make jelly. It was one of my favourites though I also enjoyed pin cherry jelly too.
The apex of berry picking was the bakeapple however. In Scandinavia, it is called cloudberry. It grows on bogs, requiring rubber boots as you scour the bog for the berries, which grow on small individual plants spread over and close to the bog, each plant with one berry. It is backbreaking work, requiring trekking over a bog and through bog holes. I picked them once which was enough for me. If you can pick a gallon of those berries, you are an expert berry picker. They understandably are expensive to buy.
Fast forward to this past week in Tryon, Prince Edward Island. We picked cultivated high bush blueberries in a farmer’s field.
The plants are spaced apart
and you could put the box provided for picking under the bush to catch berries which might fall as you picked.
My husband and I picked quickly, filling the two boxes with the huge berries which taste like candy.
I froze some and we are eating some with yogurt for breakfast. After a lifetime of picking wild berries, this latest experience stirs up memories of simpler times when berry picking was a part of food gathering and August was the start of picking for another year.
Blueberries anyone?
