One advantage of living in
the country was the many fruits that you could gather that grew wild. My
grandmother and we children would gather lard buckets (gallon tin buckets that we bought lard in) and head for our favorite
huckleberry patches. This was hard work. You could not very well get down on
your knees to pick the huckleberries as this would crush the plants. So it
meant you had to bend over while you were picking the huckleberries. You also
had to be aware of snakes. There are a variety of snakes that live in the
Ozarks of Arkansas. Some of these are poisonous snakes, for example the
rattlesnake, copperhead and water moccasin. You did not want to reach for
huckleberry only to have a poisonous snake put its fangs in your hand. So you
had to be very careful where you step and we put your hands.
Rattlesnakes do not like to be around people so they tend to
move away when they hear you coming. Moccasin are generally found around water
for not much to contend with and picking huckleberries. But copperheads do not
move away from people and are likely to be found where there are ripe berries
that small rodents might want to eat.
It is however, a beautiful site to see several lard buckets
full of huckleberries. When we got home with our huckleberries we had to wash
them and cleaned them. Then they would be canned and fruit jars for use later
on where they would be put in pies or make jelly out of them.
Blackberries were my favorite. Not that they were easy to
pick, they were not. They tend to grow in thickets which are very close
together. They grew to heights off for the 6 feet tall. One good thing about
picking them you did not have to bend over. The bad part about picking them was
that they had briars on them. At the end of the day picking blackberries the
ends of your fingers would be pricked. All day long you were picking briars out
of your fingers. But the end result was worth all of the pain. As the old sage
says, "no pain no gain." Some of these blackberry thickets would
cover an area larger than the big back yard. In order to get to the berries in
the middle of the thicket we would take boards that were about 8 feet long and 12
inches wide, we would ladies board up against the blackberry bushes and began
walking on the board which would cause the bushes in front of us to go down to
the ground and allow us to walk out of the board for 8 feet. This would let us
pick the berries on both sides of the board. Of course we would destroy the
berries were the board was setting but better to destroy some berries then not
be able to get to the others. When we were at the end of the 8 feet of the
board we would place another such board and walk out on it etc. etc. thus we
conquered blackberry thickets.
Blackberries have many uses but my favorite one is
blackberry jelly. The process of making the jelly was to clean the blackberries
by washing them thoroughly. Removing all lambs and stems and leaves saw all
that was left was just blackberries. You would then heat them in a pan with a
little bit of water on to the berries would begin to disintegrate. You would
then push them through a colander to begin the process of removing the juice. A
colander would remove most of the seeds. But to get the pulp out you had to use
cheesecloth. You would put the cheesecloth over a large bowl and pour the pulp
and juice on it. The juice would easily go through it meeting the pulp in the
cheesecloth you would wrap the pulp around the cheesecloth and squeeze more
juice out. From the juice she would make jelly and from the pulp you would make
jam. To make both jam and jelly you had to add sugar. You had to cook it long
enough for it to jell.
We had a couple of wild plumb thickets on our farm. These
plum bushes grow to about 6 to 8 feet tall. The size of these plum were a
little larger than the largest of grapes. They turned a bright yellow when they
were ripe. We cook these in water until they were soft then ran them through a
colander to remove the seeds and peelings. We then added sugar and salt and
cooked it until it jelled.
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