Wild Berries

We picked a lot of our own friuts, berries and vegetables out of the fields. Our garden was about a fourth of an acre and we spent lots of time in it from early spring until fall.  We had corn, okra, butterbeans, green beans, squash, cucumbers, field peas, asparagus, boysenberries and a variety of mustard and turnip greens.  There were wild blackberries, strawberries and muscadines as well.  They grew in the fields between the Southern and P&N railroads which were about 50 yards apart for several miles along our road.  Strawberries were usually ripe right about Mother's Day, the blackberries were ready in late June and July and the muscadines ripened in the fall.

Picking berries was an ordeal.  There were snakes, wasps, bees, chiggers and mosquitos everywhere the berries were.  And I can't forget the blackberry briars.  In order to get to the "best berries" you had to get right into the middle of the blackberry patch.  That always resulted in painful scratches.  So, in order to get the delicacies, you had to get really hot and sweaty, be bitten by a variety of bugs and animals and risk infection from painful briar scratches. But we all thought the prize worth the effort.

The wild strawberries were about the size of M&M's and required, picking and capping.  A 10 quart bucket of berries, caps and stems  would yield about 4 quarts of berries.  Mamma made strawberry pies, jam and ice cream.  The jam was put up in 8 ounce jelly glasses and covered with melted parafin.  You could take that jam and put it on a hot buttered biscuit and have probably the most delicious breakfast ever tasted by humans.  We made a lot of blackberry pies and Mamma made jelly out of the blackberries so that there were no seeds to get in Daddy's teeth.  The muscadines were mainly for eating, but Mamma made wine out of some and also made a concentrate of the juice to mix with water to make a kind of soft drink for us kids. The wine was made by mixing enough sugar in the muscadine juice to float an egg.  Then the juice would ferment for a couple of weeks and get bottled and capped.  In the winter, the wine would be brought out for stomach aches and rarely for some sort of celebration.  As I remember it, the wine was very sweet and not very alcoholic at all.

One quick wine story...  Mamma made some blackberry wine one summer and bottled it in some gin bottles that she found somewhere.  The bottles were stored on the top shelf our her and Daddy's closet.  Later on in the summer we took an overnight trip to the mountains and when we came home there was a definite Mogan David smell in their bedroom.  The wine had continued to ferment until one of the bottles literally blew up and drenched all their clothes with very sweet and sticky wine.  There was no church for us that Sunday!