![](\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_Xp3XgAulJbI\/S_bqBAjPiBI\/AAAAAAAAALg\/GjMsuwtHHqc\/s1600\/Berries.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\nToday there were zillions ready to be picked, so I went out to check on the Garden Team, consisting of Crystal, Michael, Matt, Andrew, and Sterling.<\/p>\n
Truth to tell, picking blackberries is not their favorite thing to do. It\u2019s hot and sticky\u2014in more ways than one! <\/p>\n
But they\u2019re troopers at heart, and Brian, the Ranch Grower, has thoughtfully set up shade tents for when the sun is really beating down. Mostly we\u2019ll make jelly out of it to sell. There are also wild plums and mustang grapes we can harvest, though we have a hard time beating the forest critters to those. But yum! Is that stuff good. We\u2019ve tried to make jelly from cactus pears, but only succeeded in making syrup, which didn\u2019t have much taste beyond the sugar in it but did almost glow in the dark.<\/p>\n We get to keep a lot of the jelly. Sometime the batch comes up short and you only get \u00be of a jar, or something like that. Or they don\u2019t set and we use them for syrup (really really good.)<\/p>\n<\/a>
And anyway, it\u2019s lots more rewarding than last year during the drought, when the berries were few and far between. This year we can get four times the berries in the same amount of time as last.<\/p>\n