August Field Trip

I set up the homeschool trip this year to the Blackberry farm. Our family does this every year. Brenda, the lady who takes our money, is this beautiful wonderful older lady. Last year she told us all about how there are not enough bees to pollinate for her blackberries. They bring in a bee hive hiver who sets up his bee hives near their blackberry bushes. After the bees are done with the blackberry bushes, the bee hive hiver picks up the hives and collects the honey the bees produced. Then he is off to the pumpkin patch not too far down the street to drop his bees off there.
It is sad that it has come to this. We are gardening bees so that we can have our food harvest. I think it used to happen naturally on it's own. Thank goodness we didn't need bee hive hivers 200 years ago, or we might not have any fruit to speak of now.
Brenda also told us this wonderful story about how she used to go skinny dipping when she was younger. She told us she was carefree and never thought of a thing but having a good time when she was younger. That makes me smile to think of this old wrinkled lady as having those kinds of memories of being young. I hope that when I am old and gray, I have all kinds of cool stuff to remember like that. The skinny dipping I have that covered, but I need to make lots more cool memories to keep my mind busy when I get older. That I will think on.

We took them home and froze them. Our first blackberry food, other than the grazing we do the day we bring them home, was blackberry cobbler. (With extra sugar, because we picked some tart ones this year.) Mmmm. It was good!!The kids always look forward to blackberry picking. Though I pick long past their attention span. I pick enough to last the whole year, so that makes the trip worth it for me. At $1.55 a pound this year, I saved a bunch of money, even considering gas. With all the talk about green living, it is great to show the girls a little about buying local.