berry heaven

Today was the first day that berries became ripe on our new farm property.

The late afternoon was perfect, slightly cloudy with a great soft southern breeze blowing through the trees, not too hot. As we approached the two mulberry trees in the overgrown wooded area, we could see the heavily laden branches, soft purple bullets hanging easily within our reach. My husband and I started with the low branches but soon had them all picked.
Mulberries are so unique, you just have to put your bowl beneath the branches and gently shake, the ripe berries fall into it, the unripe still clinging tightly.

When they were too high for me to pick, I left him to gather from the high branches and wandered off to look for blackberries and other wild herbs.
I picked honeysuckle branches filled with blossoms as I walked along, the fragance coming from the branches very intoxicating, soft and sweet. I love to make bath oils from honeysuckle so I'm very happy when they begin to flower.
I stopped every few yards picking off the blackberries clustered on pretty purple canes. They were just starting to ripen, so we only got about 2 1/2 cups.

About 2 hours later, despite our sunblock and hats, we were very hot, red faced and ready to leave.
(it was only 80 degrees today)
On the way home I asked my husband what he wanted to do with the berries we'd picked and he answered as I knew he would, "Jelly please." We had at least 5-6 cups of berries in our bowls which will make a nice amount of jelly.

When we got home a great recipe was found on All Recipes.com for blackberry cobbler . (it only required 2 1/2 cups of blackberries so I was in blackberry heaven.)
I think I'm going to get a bit of vanilla bean ice cream for the cobbler.

One of the best parts of the day was the fact that we only saw one little non -poisonous snake.
He didn't bother us and we didn't bother him.