Stealing Blackberries

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Sep 9th 2007 @ 1:40PM

As I mentioned in this post, my mom makes jam every summer. Most of what she cans comes from fruit that she and my dad pick themselves. The blueberries come from a Pick-Your-Own place on Sauvie Island, the plums comes from the yards of friends and the blackberries are typically come from a wild patch in the Columbia River Gorge. This year they drove out to the regular blackberry patch, only to discover that it had been cut back severely during some road work. They picked what they could and headed back to Portland, without enough berries to make a batch of jam.

The next night, they headed for a blackberry bramble in their neighborhood that my mom discovered one night while walking the dog, to see if they couldn't make up the difference. They started picking, wandering around a bit as you do when you are following the patterns of available berries. They had been picking for awhile, excited to have found a source of berries, when they heard a woman say, "Excuse me?" Looking up, they realized that they had inadvertently crossed over into someone's yard. She continued, "I was planning on making pie." My parents apologized (and were relieved to notice that there were still tons of berries left on the bushes) and headed home with what they had already picked (luckily, there was a plenty there for jam).

In this case, it was just an honest mistake. However, there have been times when my mom and I have been a little bit more deliberate in our foraging of fruit. Let's hear your stories of liberated fruits and vegetables.

Filed Under: Ingredients
Tags: blackberries, fruit, liberated fruit, stolen fruit, vegetables

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

9-09-2007 @2:42PM Geena said... There have been times when I've wandered just a bit past the property line of peoples fence-rows I've had permission to pick from on blackberry picking outings, especially late in the season if they haven't been picked over before then.
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9-09-2007 @2:44PM Liam Malone said... I love picking damsons at this time of year, there is a cracking tree that overhangs from a local farm. Early mornings is the time we liberate the damsons we launder them into damson cheese by lunchtime.
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9-09-2007 @7:29PM EAC said... Reminds me of this old poem by Leigh Hunt...

"...Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
Stolen kisses much completer,
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen, be your apples.

When to bed the world are bobbing,
Then's the time for orchard-robbing;
Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
Were it not for stealing, stealing."

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9-09-2007 @8:25PM Henry said... My garbage men steal my mangoes every year. Last year I caught them up in the tree 10 feet off the ground!
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9-09-2007 @8:32PM ooda said... This is where I'm lucky. The suburb where I live used to be market gardens, so while everything is rather built up, we have a huge park nearby with some of the trees of old just ready for the picking. In particular, there are about six fig trees around 14 feet wide by 16 feet high. These are teaming with fruit, and it's common for people just to walk up an take bags worth of fruit. That said, it's usually people with more european backgrounds, as they're the ones more into making jam.

Each season I probably take maybe twenty to thirty pounds of fruit, and have some for jam, while the rest I'll have just on their own (great to have fresh figs torn open with a bit a mozzarella, prosciutto, and honey inside).
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9-10-2007 @1:40PM Adriane said... Our neighbors live in their "summer home" for about 2 months out of the year. They have many lovely blueberry bushes that produce an amazing crop...but that usually all go to the birds! It's true, my family has gone into their yard many times and liberated the blueberries from Bird Doom. Yes, we've been caught before. No, we didn't learn our lesson. We don't really do that so much anymore though, now that they've been staying longer through the summer.

Ps- Ooda, that sounds like heaven!!
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9-10-2007 @12:16PM David said... I have vivid memories of my grandmother practically locking up the brakes on the old Chevy with me spilling out of the backseat along with my cousins to work our way down a fence row of wild blackberries. She kept buckets in the trunk for just such an emergency/opportunity. We would be eaten alive by the chiggers that seemed to love the berries even more than my grandfather. The next day would be spent putting clear fingernail polish over the bumps where the chiggers had burrowed under our skin. To this day I can't eat a cobbler without getting an itchy feeling.
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9-10-2007 @4:08PM Mia said... I ask my neighbors if I can pick some fruit we have a good relationship and they are always very sweet about it. I ask cause I wouldnt want to be in my house seeing someone sneaking around cause if you arent expecting someone in your yard it can be quite a scary feeling especially if your stealing the fruit at night.

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9-10-2007 @7:55PM kaitlin Hess said... I am always known to sneak into other people's property when there is berries and corn to be had. I am a naughty naughty girl.... How very Merry and Pippin of me!
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9-11-2007 @3:30AM Alexandra said... Stole two figs from a tree today while taking a walk... heaven!
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9-10-2007 @11:51PM dragonet2 said... One of my best memories of my grandma is her helping us climb up into the plum trees to collect fruit for her famous pinkish plum jam/jelly. My mother didn't even protest when she found out about it. it was a nice summer occupation from about 8-12 years old, after that I got too bit for it. And my parents would bring me to grandma's house and leave me for a couple weeks, usually right when those nice jelly plums were ripe (Grandma lived in Miami, Okla.)
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9-13-2007 @9:09AM Wanda said... Oh the memories of years gone by!
When I was about 10 or so, a girl friend and I, went to pick wild black raspberries. We would walk for about two miles through the woods and then we would have to cross a very old wooden train bridge to get to a very bountiful patch of berries. (This was the time when parents didn't have to worry about there children.) We picked for hours and we each had several gallons of beautiful berries.
When we were crossing the old train bridge to return home, we were about in the middle when we heard the sound of a train whistle comimg from around the bend. We raced to a old wooden conductors platform that was about three feet square. We had to hang on for dear life. The train was very long and shook the plat form as we clung on to keep from falling off. As we were hanging on the vibration caused our berries to plunge over the side and into the creek below us. To this day, when-ever I eat black raspbery jam I think about that day! Not about the danger we were in, but about what a shame it was to lose all those berries.
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