I went out into the garden yesterday to harvest some blackberries. (Yes, that's right! The blackberries are ripening. Five or six at a time!) I expected to be picking bullbous juicy dark runny berries. But this is what I found.
Faux blackberries. Okay. Not even close to blackberries. It's this terrible viney windy fast-growing weed that has encircled the entire bush without us even noticing it was there. Until it started to bear its own fruit and give up its camouflage. So I started untangling this monster. Copious lengths of vine resulted. Like taking out a small intestine, it was confounding that there was so much of it in such a little space! And this is now my least favorite of all weeds. It smells like burning rubber. I swear, once you start pulling it up, it's like standing at a scenic overlook half-way down a very steep and heavily-trafficked mountain. And it attracts aphids. Lots and lots of aphids. Yellow slimy burst-if-you-breath-wrong coating-all-the-stems cover-your-hands-in-gook aphids. (I may not be girly in many areas of life, but bugs are not something I feel the need to be strong about. I scream when I have to smoosh cucumber beetles. So just imagine me unweaving fifty feet of this nastiness.) Luckily for the blackberry bush I feel it's worth fighting for. And so now it looks like this:
Nothing but blackberries, baby! And though we may not get a cobbler with six blackberries coming ripe at a time, we at least get a super duper treat with breakfast every morning!
