mia ~

So you think I've gone MIA ~ wrong ... I'm still here ... it's just that I've been super busy.  Busy picking berries and keeping up with the kids celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, camping and a class reunion.  I've been making jelly and canning pickles.  All kinds of distractions going on :)

Dear Hubby had four days off from work and we were on a mission ... picking berries.  It takes LOTS of berries for me to keep up with my jamming.

At Nelson's Berry Farm in Westboro you can pick blueberries as big as quarters.  

We picked 5 gallons of them!  That will make a BIG batch of jelly :)

They have several varieties in their fields. 

 Those berries sure make for a yummy pie too ~

... and some scrumptious jam.

Then we headed into the woods.  We drove for miles through the Chequamegon National Forest and Nicolet National Forest in search of wild black berries.  I just hate buying berries when The Good Lord has them growing in His Garden ... all you have to do is take the time to go and harvest them.

We drove down a lot of gravel roads ...

some of them were pretty narrow ...  more like ATV trails instead of vehicle roadways.

We went uphill and down ...

pass creeks ...

choked off with water hyacinths ...

pass little pot hole lakes ...

This was a nice stopping place for our picnic lunch.

We found some black cherries ... so we picked a gallon of those.

a stem of wild black cherries

BUT .. I needed black berries, not cherries ... but we just couldn't find a good picking of them.

Finally ~ we hit a good patch.  Just follow the bear trails and you don't get too stuck and stabbed by the thorny brush.  When you find good black berry brush in the wild in my neck of the woods you also find signs of bear.  It just makes the berry picking more interesting :) ... a little competition between you and nature to see who gets to the berries first.  We found quite a few patches along the way; but the bear had beaten us to most of them.

We picked and picked and even went back a second day and picked some more.
The picture of them on the stem are pretty small.  We found some that were as big as your thumb and hanging like grapes.

All total ... we ended up with 8 gallons of them! That's a lot of black berries ... but I'll use them up.

We also found a nice batch of highbush cranberries.  They aren't ripe yet but I picked a branch of them anyways.  We'll be heading back into the woods in a few weeks to get some of those if the bear don't beat us to them.

I wish I could take a break today and just enjoy the view out my window ...

... or just sit out on the deck and sip tea and watch the hummingbirds ~

 

... but I have a big bucket of cucumbers sitting in the kitchen waiting to get turned into pickles :)

~~~~~~~~***~~~~~~~~

1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

 Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, ¹²so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

Until next time ...

So it goes in my neck of the woods.

~mel