Beautiful fruit- do Marrionberries taste anything like blackberries? My mouth is watering-

gmom74,

Marion berry is a trailing blackberry (dewberry). IMO the best tasting blackberry.

Eric

I've never bought blackberries from the supermarket- I'm afraid they wouldn't taste like the ones we used to pick and I would be disappointed. Occasionally some are called Dewberries. One day I'll try a box.

I never heard of the first kind, thanks for the education on that.

The second photo looks like gooseberries to me, but I've never seen golden currants, just the red ones.

Good shots!

aliska12000,

Currants and Gooseberries are both in the "Ribes" Family.
I have red, black and golden currants. I also have red and black gooseberries.
The photo,is a gooseberry called Captivator. When ripe,it will be a deep red.

Thanks for the extra photo. Chekhov wrote a neat short story about gooseberries.

The only gooseberries I have seen are green, and the only currants, red. I don't think currants retain the blossom fragment (don't know what it's called) on the bottom, at least not the ones I'm familiar with.

I wish I had more room to experiment with berries. I love boysenberries better than blackberries, tried them once and they didn't make it through the winter. Am going to try to find a spot just for some black raspberries, my fav.

Incidentally, a friend brought me a small batch of black raspberries, they looked beautiful, but the seeds were the sharpest and hardest, horrid things actually, I have ever experienced, don't know why that was. I ended up putting them through the food mill and strainer and just used the juice on ice cream (I cooked them with a little sugar and extra water).

aliska,

"I ended up putting them through the food mill and strainer and just used the juice on ice cream (I cooked them with a little sugar and extra water)"

That sounds great! Could be used for pancake syrup too.

Eric

I never get enough to experiment with. A couple years ago I found some wild ones growing by the cemetery and got enough for one small pie. I put water over them and left them in the freezer for over a year. They were fine. I just added sugar and thickened with corn starch when I got around to making the pie. If I have fresh fruit I usually use flour for thickening in pies all except for fresh cherries. Cornstarch. I cooked these latest too thin to use for conventional syrup because I didn't want to use that much sugar or cook them that long, they were fine with just runny juice on the ice cream. It was still good, but real syrup, not artificially flavored, would be much better. I never got the hang of making that kind of stuff, cook til it sheets off wooden spoon, xxx on candy thermometer, to buy sure jel or not (not for syrup but for jams and jellies), my Mormon friend, now deceased, made the most wonderful jams and jellies. So did my mom and grandmother. Out of anything they could get their hands on. Grandmother's ground cherry jam. Yummm! It was a big deal when my mom found a guy who sold currants not too far from where we lived. Place is still there but bet the currants are gone. It looks like a little 20's style bungalow in the woods, but near fast lane urban development, so that place will be gone in 10 years I'll bet.

Usually if I can find enough, I make a black raspberry pie, which I and older people that remember just love. I used to be able to find the large restaurant-size cans of black raspberry pie filling at a wholesale place, but the stuff is scarce as hen's teeth now; I don't think anybody makes it, and if they do, it is $$$. I haven' seen it.

Incidentally, I developed an unconventional method of making no-roll pie crust with my favorite Crisco pie crust recipe. It's kind of like cobbler but tastes just like real pie because it is, only looks different and different texture for the crumbly topping. I bake it in a rectangular glass baking dish. It takes a little practice the way I do it now but is a lot less messy, faster, no more patching, no more swearing, banging the rolling pin and bending it . . .I used to have a terrible temper, have really mellowed out of late . . .but still don't want to roll pie crust. Lard makes a perfect circle. I don't want to use lard.

I just sent it in to a local paper because they were talking about rhubarb pie recipes. My mother made THE best. And of course she neatly rolled double pie crust. My son and girls go NUTS when I make rhubarb pie. I guess you have to grow up eating those things or you don't like them when you are an adult.

When I start a reply, I never know what will come out next. I was just thinking of you with all those berries, you've got to do a lot of things to use them up.

Make wine?

How about that for a short answer.

Eric

A short answer is better than my long diatribe(s). I only like grape wine and only a few of those.

That funny berry wine might be good. If you eat them, do you have to eat those things sticking out?

aliska,

That's just the shriveled blossom on the bottom. They rub right off. I'll probably juice some of them. Not make wine.

Eric