My Farmhouse Journal

The Blackberry Patch While mowing the horse pastures one afternoon, I noticed many blackberry patches around the field. They’re red now and prolific and plump from all the rain we’d had. It won’t be long and we can pick them, I thought. As a kid, we made our own pails to pick berries in. We took nails and made two holes one on each side of the tin coffee can, then slipped a thin piece of wire through to make the handle. It was a great thing to have… even besides using it for berry picking. Then, Mother instructed us that we could wear a belt and strap the pail to the belt and use both hands for picking, making the chore go faster. Sounds exciting! At first it is. The first berry is good too. Then it becomes boring as most kids know and the berry vines get caught in your hair and on your clothes trapping you and forces you to call out for help. Then you’re bleeding, or worse, bugs are biting you and so on. And you get my picture, right? During the picking season one evening of my youth, Mother informed us we were going to meet at Grandma Fender’s farm, all of us, to pick blackberries the next day. She made it sound pleasant and exciting. We had never picked berries with Grandma before. So the next morning, extremely early, we got up, “while it is still cool” and drove down the long gravel driveway ending at Grandma’s white clapboard farmhouse. She appeared promptly. There, we met my Mother’s older sister, Vivian, a bunch of my cousins and Grandma, who was carrying a galvanized washtub from the farmhouse. “ What’s that for?” I asked in wonderment. “Well Sherry, we are going to pick until we have this full of blackberries so we will have plenty for jams and jellies, and pies and cakes this year,” she said matter-of-factly. I could see she wasn’t joking. I looked across the tub at sister Debbie. She looked at me. Her eyes were as big as last night’s dinner plate. I am sure mine were too. But we didn’t question her or smart off. We just didn’t think it was possible to pick THAT many berries in a day. Maybe a month—but not in a day. “It won’t take long, look how many hands we have to pick with,” she told us as we marched down the gravel road toward the blackberry patch. At the wild blackberry patch in the holler, the berries hung prolifically. There were oodles of sweet, plump berries. Some went into our mouth immediately, though we were scolded for it. All was going quite well until we coughed and gagged from the most fowl odor from afar. “What is that?” we all asked. “It’s a pole cat,” Grandma told us. And she went on to explain how the polecat worked and then told us the more familiar name, a skunk. But if we happened upon a snake, she had brought a hoe to take care of it, as she was scared to death of them. Many hands do make quick work and by the time the noon sun had heated up the holler, or soon after, finally, our picking was done and we headed for the farmhouse for lunch. Grandma’s girls grabbed a handle on each side of the washtub and joyfully we headed for the house. Did I mention that our pails had to be full too? Yep! We learned that later because there were so many berries to pick from. That winter, for Christmas Eve dinner, I was about to taste Grandma’s homemade blackberry jam cake with caramel icing. Unfortunately, when Grandma removed the tin cake cover to reveal her masterpiece to me, her cake had split down the middle and the caramel icing had slid off the warm cake. It looked a mess. But she took it in stride and jokingly began pinning it together with toothpicks then re-spreads the icing back on top as best she could. Though it looked a mess, it was most delicious. Many years later I fondly reminisced of that berry-picking day, Grandma Fender now in her eighties, I asked her for the jam cake recipe. She gave me a hand written copy of that very famous cake. But more importantly, she gave me a lasting memory that never fades. I cherish the recipe and the memory of her. She passed in 2008, at age 92. So Here’s the Thing… As children we often don’t see the value in work. The impatient delay of filling that washtub became boring and I wanted to quit. Heck all us grandkids did. But Grandma had set a goal that morning and with her perseverance of us not quitting before we completed what we set out to do, somehow left a lasting impression, especially of how “many hands make quick work” of an enormous task. It is true “many hands make quick work,” as it did in the berry patch that hot summer morning. Now I, myself, have shared this phrase with my grandchildren over and over, that was instilled in me in the blackberry patch of my youth. GRANDMA’S BLACKBERRY JAM CAKE Blend together 1 cup butter 6 eggs 2 cups sugar 1 ½ cups blackberry jam Next add 3 cups flour 1/2 cup whipping cream with 2 teaspoons baking soda stirred in it. 1 ½ teaspoons nutmeg 2 teaspoons allspice 1 teaspoons ground cloves 2 teaspoons cinnamon Bake at 350 degrees in 3 prepared pans no more than twenty-five minutes. Grandma's note on the recipe she gave me in 1997 “If it falls apart use toothpicks to hold it together; they digest pretty good. Ha! Ha! This is a real old recipe.”