Do you know the protecting patron saint of Rubus occidentalis (black raspberry)?  It’s the mosquito!  Or it could be stinging nettle or poison ivy.

How do I know that?  Years of experience and lots of itching!  Maybe it’s because the juice of the black raspberry is blood red that mosquitoes are always hovering around them—not that the berry itself does not have significant protection of its own!  Last evening, however, the weather was just about perfect for a walk to the raspberry patch, and this is the height of the three weeks or so when the berry is perfect for picking.  So with my belt bucket, I meandered down our relatively urban road to what you might call a gentleman’s berry patch.  Thanks to the lawn service, a neatly mowed strip of grass lies between the road and the plants that have volunteered in abundance hardly a half mile from our place.  All one needs to do is lean in and pick, but it is indeed best to wear a long-sleeved shirt and, for baldies like me, wear a hat—which I did not!

So it was watch out for the nettles, the thorns, and the poison ivy and pick a handful of berries—then drop them in the bucket and swat the mosquitoes on my arms and noggin.  And do it again until you can no longer find berries ripe enough to tickle off the stem.  It’s important to select the blackest of berries that come off easily, because if they are still tinged with red and have to be coaxed from the bush, they’ll not yet be sweet enough for the best eating.  I got a little more than two pints in about a half hour—berries, not mosquitoes.  Though the bugs tried, they got no pints from me.

Then it was back home where the ice cream was waiting in the fridge for a top-notch midsummer night’s snack.  Keep in mind that these were black raspberries, not blackberries.  And there’s a major difference in taste between the two regardless of the biases of regional wild plant experts.  When I was in the San Juan Islands, where the blackberry (Rubus ursinus or Rubus armeniacus), salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis), and thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) reign, I was reading about them in the regional wild plant guide, and they said that the blackberry was “delicious”—and that black raspberries (sometimes called blackcaps) were “edible.”  Edible?!   You gotta be kidding; they’re scrumptious.  Had those western experts ever really tasted eastern Rubus occidentalis?

We have blackberries here too, but they don’t hold a candle to the black raspberry, which does not have that peculiar tangy aftertaste you get from a blackberry right off the vine.  Maybe in a pie well sugared there is little difference, but, in my book, fresh from the bush, the only Rubus that comes close in deliciousness is the domesticated red raspberry.

Not that I really have an opinion about this.

See you outdoors!

Dean