bluehorizonfarm.com Blog

For the past week or so, I’ve been making a daily trip to the best blackberry patches on the farm to harvest fruit. The frequent and heavy rains this spring have made this year’s blackberry crop one of the most abundant that I’ve ever seen in North Carolina (nothing compares to the berries that I’ve seen in the Pacific Northwest).

Harvesting the berries requires a steady hand: one false move and the plant will give you a painful introduction to its thorns. As an extra bonus, an itchy rash sometimes forms around the cuts made by the thorns, probably because teeny tiny baby thorns are still embedded in your flesh!

As painful as the process sounds, after a taste of the sweet blackberries, the thorns become a mere inconvenience in the quest to harvest as many berries as possible.

Although Blackberry hand-held computers have become known for their addictive properties, and are often referred to as “Crackberries”, I think that actual blackberries are even more addictive and deserve to share the Crackberry nickname with their texting counterparts.

Two precocious tomatoes, about to get acquainted with my stomach!

We’ve set a record for our earliest tomato harvest ever! We’ve been eating Sun Gold tomatoes for a week now, having harvested our first one on June 7.

To what do we owe our precocious tomatoes? Wall O’ Water, all the way! The Wall O’ Waters allowed us to set our plants out in February, and allowed them to grow like weeds during March and April.

In fact, I think we would been eating tomatoes before the start of June, had our plants not been frosted in a freak frost on May 19 (the official frost free date in our part of North Carolina is April 27).

Though I had some choice words to say when the plants were knocked back to the ground by frost, all I can say now is “Yum!”