When we were building our house there were only a handful of houses in our neighborhood of over two hundred lots. At the time we were clearing our lot I noticed a small, spindly blackberry bush on the next lot over. I think I got four or five blackberries off it that season and by the time blackberry season came around again the bush was gone due to construction next door.
I like blackberries. I like picking them. I’m not sure why I like picking them because it’s always in hot weather and in order to protect your body from the brambles you need to wear long pants and sleeves. And while cotton only provides minimal protection, it’s better than nothing. Invariably I’d come home with pokes and scrapes but a bowl full of blackberries. And to get to the blackberries I had to travel to a location where I knew there were blackberries growing in a public place and get there before others had gotten all the berries.
So I was fairly happy to notice two years later down the hill in our back yard a blackberry bush growing. I was happy then but today I’m just annoyed by the menace. Blackberry bushes are highly invasive. It grows underground and appears meters away in the middle of the play structure no matter how much we cut it back. The bush is so fast growing my yard guys don’t even catch it in time before someone gets scratched by it, being children and not noticing it as the run and play around the yard.
I have the crew aggressively cut it back once or twice each year but it comes back more fiercely it would seem every time. I might be more amenable to the growth and expansion if there was measurable output of berries during the one month of the year the fruit is available, but this particular bush variety is the most armed and least producing type I’ve ever seem. That, and the few paltry berries we’ve been able to collect aren’t very flavorful.
I would very much like to remove the whole thing, only the bush isn’t on our property. It’s not on mine, or the other two neighbor’s properties that triangularly abut it, the bush being mostly on common property at the back of the neighborhood heading down a steep grade towards a creek. It’s property that won’t ever be maintained by the HOA unless there’s a real need so it’s more or less up to us as homeowners to decide what to do to manage it. At this point the general consensus is to keep it at bay and hope it will have a bigger crop next year. For now, I’m getting my blackberries at the farmer’s market and saving my skin.
The Big Boy Update: My son called me into the living room yesterday and said, “I have ear wax.” This was new. We don’t clean their ears much at all as they’ve never had an issue. I went and got cotton swabs and was told it was his left ear that had the wax. And he was right, it did. I checked his right ear too and it had a bit, but my son knew what he was talking about.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter was at our sitter’s house last night. She came home with Tristan and I asked her how the night went (knowing she had had a great time with the other four children who were also over there). She told me though, “it didn’t go planned as life”.
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