Wild Raspberries

During the summer, the side and backyard at my parent's house looks like a jungle. At a glance, most people would think they need to do some major weed-eating. Sometimes, I think it takes my dad a lot of self-control to not take his tractor to the chaos of bushes, instead he just mows a path through them. Because buried inside the mass amount of leaves and trees is a hidden treasure, hundreds, maybe thousands of wild raspberries.

At the beginning of each summer, I still go home to pick the raspberries with my mom. We start watching for them in early May, because we know if we wait too long, the birds will be enjoying a tasty treat at our expense. Usually it's June by the time they ripen. Then we wake up early in the morning to beat the summer heat and take old ice cream buckets outside to begin our hunt.

For the record, I don't like bugs. I particularly HATE spiders, but they seem to like me. As you can imagine, while picking raspberries in the woods we stumble upon a plethora of different critters, so I make our hunts rather entertaining with my squealing. Through the years, I think I've gotten better at controlling my irrational fear and the squeals only come out on occasion now.


It typically takes us a couple hours to make it through all of the bushes. Then a day or two later, we go back out to pick the newly ripened raspberries. The cycle is repeated for a couple weeks until there are no more berries to be picked. Some days, we are lucky to retrieve half a gallon. Other days, my mom and I might both fill our gallon buckets. We used to package the raspberries and my Granny would make raspberry cobbler for us. Now my mom has taken over the cobbler baking. Truth be told, I'm not a huge fan of raspberries, but I always eat the cobbler, plus I drown it in vanilla ice cream. Even if I never ate any of the raspberries, it wouldn't matter to me. It's more important to me that I get to spend time with my mom and we get to continue the simple tradition of picking our wild raspberries.