I love eating wild blackberries during my walks at this time of year. Sampling one or two tart berries from every bush along the way, it always seems to me that each produces fruit unlike any other, any place else: as (they say) small vineyards produce distinctively different wines because of their soil and situation.
But professional tasters (if any exist) of local blackberries have to work on a much more delicate scale than wine tasters. One meter is a long way in blackberry space.
A poem Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney starts
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it.
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One of my earliest memories is following along as my family went blackberry picking in the quiet country lanes above Berkhamsted. Every plastic container in the house being employed in the task. Huge golden fields of wheat towering on one side and hedgerows as high as houses on the other (I was only 2 or 3) and no sound but insects buzzing and the tiny sounds of fruit-picking.
It would make a lovely sound picture for one of those short Radio 4 audio diaries.
But you're right to get 'em eaten while you can. They go so fast. The visual memory of their presence lasts far longer than their actual season.
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The easily reached bushes in the field have tart, pippy, small ones at the bottom end by the stream they are almost unreachable, large, juicy and sweet. The best ones seem to be next to the road/along the edge of the carpark where the sun is strongest and the vegetation least. But we were always told not to eat them because of the lead in the petrol when I was a child.
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We have a disused airfield near us with hedges full of blackberries in September. They make a really delicious delicately flavoured ice cream. It amazes me every year that Tesco seem to think it worth their while to offer blackberries at over two quid for six ounces, when everyone who visits the store could have stopped off on the way and picked a couple of hundredweight for free.
Top tip: Check out the largest dog regularly walked in the vicinity of the blackberries, and only pick those higher than its hind quarters!
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Apart from the odd few scoffed while picking, they should be properly washed before using them in cooking. Besides road dust, asbestos brake dust, bird poo and dog wee there's also whatever spray has been used on the adjoining fields that has drifted into the hedgerow.
Oh, by the way, before slicing your lemon to put in your G&T or grating the peel of citrus fruit for use in cooking, do wash the fruit in warm water first. That helps remove the wax that is used to hold on the pesticide and fungicide spray.
You don't half learn some tat working in a greengrocer's.
There used to be a few wild strawberries growing in a strip of woodland in North London just beyond the end of our road. I don't think anyone knew they were there. (I discovered them by chance when courting.) Biting into a dark red, tiny, seed-covered wild strawberry is like detonating a strawberry grenade in your mouth.
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My mouth is starting to water, my boys liked tart fruit but drew tge line at sloes - and who could blame them - tongue shrivellers!