Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week the blackberries would ripen.
[from Seamus Heaney, Blackberry-Picking)
I checked the blackberry bushes today, grown cordon-style on posts and wires. They are a cultivated, thornless variety so my hands are not "peppered with thorn pricks" as Heaney reminisces and as was the same for us growing up, and later when the children were young. They are beginning to crop well.
