Love those delicious blackberries

Ivar Leidus, Wikimedia Commons

Plump, ripe blackberries are fun to eat even without cooking anything. It can be hard to save enough for a recipe.

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My own blackberries are only just now starting to get a blush on them, but some of my friends have been picking theirs.

When they get ripe, I never have any leftovers to pack away in the freezer. Partly because I don’t get all that many and partly because I can eat them nonstop. My blackberry vine is thornless, and I really appreciate not having to get stabbed while picking or pruning. The variety is Chester, but there are several other types of thornless blackberry plants.

When I was a kid, one of my grandmothers would cook a kettle of sweetened fresh blackberries and then drop a biscuit dough batter into the bubbling mixture. There are few things that taste better than a bowl of tender, sweet dumplings smothered in a sea of blackberries.