PEA RIDGE — Lately we have been having fresh berries from our garden, more of them than from any previous year since we moved back to Pea Ridge. Several years ago we made a trip to the garden center in Bentonville and brought home a number of settings of thornless blackberries and some raspberry bushes. They have thrived.

Last year the blackberries produced well, but the birds got most of the berries before we could get out to pick them. Even our raspberries, which had only produced a few berries earlier, are doing well this year.This time we are actively racing the birds for the berries, and most days we get more than the birds do.

I guess we’ll need to put up some netting over our berries to ward off the birds. But, we like the birds, too, and are willing to share with them, if only they would reserve our share for us. Thornless blackberries are strange to me, I am so accustomed to blackberries outfitted with wicked hooked spikes. Wild blackberries, like we always have had on the farm, are well armed briars, menacing and ruthless! I am pretty sure some of them are genetically programmed to reach out and grab you when you get close. Our thornless blackberries are very gentle, kindly things. Here at our house, it is the raspberries that are mean and wicked and out to snare you with their sharp points.

But, like the blackberries, the raspberries are delicious to the taste. I usually just like to eat the raspberries straight from the garden, with no processing, no sweetening, no embellishing. On the other hand, I like blackberries when they are worked up in pies, or more especially in cobblers. I have always been partial to blackberry cobbler. Of course other cobblers are good, too. I love a good peach cobbler. But blackberry cobbler is oneof those finer things in life.

It is just very hard to top a good blackberry cobbler, all moist and sweet and gooey and yummy.

When I was a boy at home on the farm we always had blackberries in the summertime, but they were wild blackberries, not like the tame variety that we have in our garden in town. Wild blackberries seem to take to fence rows, and they thrive there, growing into a clump and spreading farther down the fence each year. But they also may grow together into a large patch out in the open, like on a hillside.

Our old briar patches were pretty much cleared away several years ago to accommodate more cow pastures, but some of the blackberries still remain out there. I remember a big briar patch on the east slope of our Hickernut Hill, just south of the house. Its berries were great, but they were well defended. To get at them you not only had to contend with the briars, which were sharp and strong enough to tear your shirt and rip your arms, but there were usually also a squad of ticks and a horde of chiggers claiming the territory around the blackberries. Being small as they are, the ticks and chiggers couldn’t keep you out of the blackberries, but they could make you pretty much miserable for days later, what with all the itching and scratching you had to do. The chiggers love me even more than the ticks,but I remember I still would go to the blackberry patch with my one gallon syrup bucket and come home with the makings of some fine blackberry pie, or cobbler, or jam. What are a few chigger bites when you can have blackberry cobbler? Whenyou have chigger bites all over and blackberry cobbler for dessert, you kind of have to decide whether to regard yourself as blessed or afflicted.

We also had gooseberries up on the hill. I love gooseberries, too. They are tart as they can be, and they are a lot of work and trouble to fix, but I really love gooseberry pie. A gooseberry is about the size of a pea;

sometimes a little bigger.

You have to pick each one individually, then stem both ends of each berry, and then you mix in sugar to soften the sour tartness a tad. Three years ago, when the Alumni Association was planning a pie supper, I asked if anyone could make me a gooseberry pie. Beulah Prophet heard about it, and she offered to make a gooseberry pie and donate it for the pie auction. So I was going to buy that gooseberry pie. The thing was, several other people heard about my gooseberry pie, and they started running up the bidding on me. My gooseberry pie cost me $50.

But I didn’t complain. It was a great gooseberry pie. Beulah is a fine lady. Her niece, Andrea Ricketts, also loves gooseberry pie. I have to bid against her every year!

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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 07/07/2010