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Carl Wernicke: Bountiful Berries

IHMC

   

  Free food is a concept with almost universal appeal. Certainly over my career as a journalist, free food was one of the major perks driving news coverage. Given the choice, you’d much rather cover an event featuring free food than one without it. Even lousy free food was better than no food. As a veteran reporter told me at an event one day, the food might not be very good, but at least there’s plenty of it.

    This food fixation is brought on by the fact that this is one of my favorite times of the year in Northwest Florida, when nature sets the free food table in a particularly pleasing way: berry-picking season.

    Dewberries have been ripening for several weeks, and blackberries are on their way. For those of you who go outdoors only to get to the mall, dewberries grow on vines that snake along the ground or climb on fences, while blackberries grow on bushes. In the wild, both are festooned with thorns. Local lore credits them as the reason why the longtime Milton festival was called Scratch Ankle, which is what happens when you walk through a berry patch. They could have called it Scratch Hands and Arms just as easily, but apparently a PR type who knew how to turn a phrase was on the planning committee.

    Anyway, dedicated berry pickers have for some time been noting the best locations for berry patches, looking for the tight clusters of white flowers that become invisible when the petals fall and the dark berries turn plump and juicy. My wife and I keep a sharp eye out for these patches, information we guard from other people who might be tempted to poach our patches.

   But in my mind the most fun in berry picking comes in stumbling upon an unknown berry patch in full ripeness. What looks from afar like a weed-filled or grassy plot becomes, upon close examination, a veritable cornucopia of plump berries. In what is both a sad commentary and a serendipitous opportunity, picking a berry patch when you are not expecting to find one is usually made possible simply by picking up a plastic bag or a softdrink cup someone has tossed out. I suppose combining litter cleanup with berry picking is a double bonus, but still.

Credit Lindsay Myers
Dewberries.

  Anyway, recently my wife and I stumbled upon a huge field of dewberries near a large commercial development on, uh, well, let’s just say it was somewhere near Pensacola. We had a small bucket in the car, and I quickly found a drink cup lying on the grass. In half an hour we had all the ripe berries we could reasonably eat, mix with yogurt or ice cream, or bake into a cobbler.  

    As soon as they are gone, we will head back to our new berry patch.

    The main drawback to berry picking season is that it ends way too soon.  But, I suppose that there is a certain wisdom in this. People tend to value that which is rare, and all too soon, finding a ripe berry on the vine will be something that you can only do next year.

    Of course, if you know where to look, wild blueberries are on the way.

 

 

    

Carl Wernicke is a native of Pensacola. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1975 with a degree in journalism. After 33 years as a reporter and editor, he retired from the Pensacola News Journal in April 2012; he spent the last 15 years at the PNJ as editor of the editorial page. He joined the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in 2012 as Senior Writer and Communications Manager, and retired from IHMC in 2015.His hobbies include reading, traveling, gardening, hiking, enjoying nature around his home in Downtown Pensacola, as well as watching baseball and college football, especially the Florida Gators and New York Yankees. His wife, Patti, retired as a senior vice president at Gulf Winds Federal Credit Union and is a Master Gardener. Carl is a regular contributor to WUWF. His commentaries focus on life in and around the Pensacola area and range in subject matter from birding to downtown redevelopment and from preserving our natural heritage to life in local neighborhoods.