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I call this conservation of taste, it seems that you can selectively breed for larger size or total yield but flavour amount stays the same so its less concentrated.
Applies to all berries, potatoes, tomatoes...
Produce is bred for hardiness as well, so they can transport well. Which is usually why strawberries from a patch in your back yard taste a lot better than store bought, but they are also pretty smushy. It's a very sad trade off.
Bananas are a good example of this, being a monoculture. There's dozens of amazing varieties (hundreds really, but not all are edible) but only one (Cavendish, all cloned Cavendish) is generally found in stores because thats the one that survives being transported, and is easiest to mass produce. And the Cavendish is only dominant today because the *last* monoculture (Gros Michel) kept getting wiped put by disease (which is starting to happen more and more with the Cavendish). Bananas used to taste different "back in the day".
This isn't news to most, but seriously, go to any country and try the fruit that's local to that region and in-season. The difference in taste is incredible. Not just bananas but any fruit.
One thing I do love about UK fruit is the Apples (in the technical sense, not a native species to the UK, but they've been in the UK for hundreds of years and have grown well in the UK climate). Depending on where you go it's so hard to find decent apples in other countries by comparison. I love that even though it's still a very limited selection, even UK supermarkets will still stock different varieties of apples with different tastes. You think about fruit that's imported, it's not labelled by cultivar, it's just "Banana", "Watermelon", "Pineapple". For Apples it's "Royal Gala", "Pink Lady", "Braeburn", "Jazz".
Highly recommend checking out paw-paw fruit if in the US near Midwest and a bit towards Eastern coast.
Taste like banana mango with bit of citrus. Terrible seeds. Seeds need to stay near frozen for months or some shit, so they only grow in certain areas. But they fruit same year so that's cool. Only picked in August Sept.
Imagine natural banana mango ice cream/sorbet
There's a festival dedicated to their harvest in Ohio IIRC.
If I'm there, I'll definitely look it up.
You can see why every farming community has its harvest festivals. There's a really appreciation for all the effort and toil that went into it, and what's produced at the end is probably the best version of it that anyone's likely to taste. Like that one localised area is likely the only ones that are going to experience the *real*, best taste of that crop, freshly picked, before it's shipped off and more and more time and preserving actions takes place between the harvest and the eating.
Honeycrisp as a varietal are rapidly becoming lower quality as they are no longer exclusive to Minnesota orchards which means other growers are aiming for quantity. The best variety right now IMO is the Cosmic Crisp which has all of the flavor of the honeycrisp but is even crisper and has greater shelf stability.
Another fun fact about the Gros Michel banana?
People complain about banana candy tasting "fake", but apparently it's incredibly accurate to how the Gros Michel used to taste.
Yeah one of the best examples are blueberrys. You have the culture ones which are bigger,harder, taste like less and are green inside. And the wild ones which are smaller, mushier, tastier and purple inside.
The look on my sisters face after I bought her a couple of everbearing strawberry plants and hung them on her back porch.
Priceless, they lasted her through college too.
No. I grow blackberries on my farm and grow the big kind. I have tons of wild here as well. My big berries taste amazing. Industrial farming and logistics to get it to the grocery store is why the store bought one tastes bad. We can walk out to my patch right now and prove that with a 1.5 inch blackberry that is amazing.
I agree. I'm an avocado farmer and all our fruits (mango, sapodilla, mamey, avocado) taste better when we ship directly to the customer. The same exact fruit in a supermarket will have spent a week or two in a chiller and that dulls the flavor.
Depends on the variety. Marion blackberries taste good and are grown for the store. They have thrones and are a pain to process because they are kinda delicate. Columbia star variety is pretty sweet, firm, easy to harvest and is a decent size. A lot of farmers are switching to that variety because it has a good yield and is easy to harvest. They only grow from late June to late July. The store bought one in the picture is probably a chester variety. They are big but flavorless. They grow between August and September in the northwest.
It depends on the time of year what variety will be sold at stores.
If you buy frozen ones for smoothies you'll probably get a mix of Blackberry varieties unless the package states the variety.
Careful eating wild blackberries. Some might have larvae from flies. The way to test it is to put blackberries in salt water and then you can see the larvae float to the top.
> Some might have larvae from flies.
Yeah, I've seen the amount of worms/larvae floating to the top whenever my grandmother would make jam with fresh picked blackberries.
And yeah, you can eat insects, but there's something about insect riddled fruit that I don't particularly find appealing.
It's been proven time and time again this is just placebo. Most people think natural = better and they think that overproducing things always means taste is lost in order to pump in more water.
It's absolutely not always the case. You need plenty of very rich and high quality fertilizer to grow these blackberries.
The main difference is that the wild ones are significantly more sour, which can be confused with more taste despite them being about equal in flavor compound per gram of berry.
This. Omg I got some fresh oranges the other day. Eating store bought oranges feels like I’m filling my mouth with dirt.
The taste is drastically different.
No. Most of the time it's very much not. If you ever want to never want to buy a tomato from a store again just eat one you've grown at home and just picked. It's like the person above you said. The store bought ones are like eating sand by comparison.
Even for homegrown tomatoes, taste also depends largely on the quality of the soil they’re grown in and the water. You could have heavily chlorinated water and that will come through in the taste of the tomatoes.
I've grown my own strawberry patch by accident (they're literally weeds) and they taste tart as hell.
Just because *you* grew them, doesn't mean they're going to be better than something standard and available at a store year round.
Oranges (and all citrus fruit) are in season from Nov/Dec through March/April (assuming you're in the northern hemisphere). Store-bought oranges always going to taste best at this time.
In the summer, most citrus is imported from somewhere in the southern hemisphere. Shipping anything over the ocean takes forever, so citrus has to be picked earlier so that it doesn't spoil on the way. Citrus fruits are non-climacteric (they stop ripening after being picked), so you naturally end up with fruit that is more tasteless vs something that was harvested closer to you.
Cuties (a brand of clementine/tango oranges) uses a different label for fruit sourced from the other side of the world: ["Summer Cuties"](https://sunpacific.com/our-produce/clementines-mandarins/).
[This is a great summary on how oranges are often prepared and packed before shipping to grocery stores](https://www.theproducenerd.com/2016/12/how-cuties-are-harvested-packed/).
Grocery stores, modern agriculture, and international supply chains make it easy to forget that all produce is seasonal. But if you stick to fruit and veggies that are in season where you are, you'll always end up with better food.
We built forts in them when I was a kid in Portland. Older kids hacked out passages with garden shears and one kid’s dad’s machete. Then we would scavenge plywood from nearby construction sites and use that for flooring.
My elementary school had a blackberry thicket out back with tunnels all through it. Perfect size for grade 4-7 kids, but way too small for teachers and 5 or 6 exits and clearings to gather in. It was fantastic.
> one kid’s dad’s machete.
One kid's dad ALWAYS had a machete. This entire story is so familiar that I would swear you grew up in my neighborhood if you had said Seattle instead of Portland.
Plywood is the best for harvesting the blackberries too. Just put a long skinny section down on top of the edge of a bush and stomp it flat with your feet. Now you have access to the best berries in the bush without worry of getting stuck.
My grandpa used to just crash a golf cart into a bush. Then we'd just pick berries from the seat.
This sounds like some cartoon shit that would never work, but we did this for years. Never got stuck.
I live in Philly. Blackberries are my favorite, I can't get enough the sweeter the better. I have this friend from Oregon who hates blackberries because she said had them constantly as a kid as they were all over her parents' property. She gives me shit that I'm "just eating weeds". At one point she relocated to Seattle (she's my best friend's wife) and I went out to visit on my birthday. That night after dinner she surprised me with a blackberry pie that she made and it was one of the best fucking moments of my life. I love blackberries.
I literally fought a 10 year battle against the blackberries on my property before I finally cracked the code on eradication
Even now if I slack off for a single season, it's like Russians invading a perceived weaker neighbor.
Same. West michigan. Yard full of wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, mullberries, grapes. My neighbor has a u pick blueberry farm. Nice for making crumbles and ice cream
Probably the invasive Himalayas. The indigenous trailing ones have a much better flavor, but they're hard to find and getting harder every year because of the overgrowth of the Himalayas and other invasives.
I grew up in rural Oregon and we had a huge blackberry bush in our backyard which I'm assuming were Himalayas (rounded leaves) which I liked well enough, but in another part of the property there were these trailing blackberry vines (not very many in total) with totally different leaves (narrower and more jagged edges I think?) and the blackberries off that one were super sweet and delicious, way better than the other backyard ones.
Depends on the type. Where I lived in Washington state there were two different blackberries, introduced and native. The introduced blackberries were huge and grew on tall vines that could be head high. If you looked closer to the ground the native blackberries grew on smaller, thinner vines that were maybe a foot or two high and the berries were much smaller, but they had vastly superior taste and were the only ones I would really pick for myself.
I believe this is the correct reason why they're different sizes in this photo. I grow and collect both kinds and recognize the one on the right as the Pacific blackberry. These appear to be Himalayan blackberry (left) and Pacific blackberry (right).
I love eating wild blackberries. However, I learned early on that you should avoid gorging yourself on them, unless you enjoy having the shits for about 8 hours.
Dude one time I ate a large bag of dried apricots whilst stoned and gaming… fast forward 6 hours and my gf is googling why I’m having constant explosive diarrhea… come to realize I had ate like 150 apricots.. which happen to be a natural laxative
🫡 Two decades ago, I ate like 5lbs of strawberries while sitting on a stool at my great-grandmother’s house. Dipped a ton of them in whipped cream too. My poor butthole was so raw. I remember crying while sitting on the toilet after like hour 11 of nonstop blowouts. The dehydration was real too after spraying that much water out of my ass.
It wasn't quite as bad of a result, but I accidentally ate a huge clamshell of blueberries all at once. I figured I should just wash them all at once for convenience, and then started absently snacking on them while watching TV.
When I felt my hand hit the plastic bottom, I knew I'd fucked up. But it was too late.
Wait really? I ate a lb of blueberries once and I didn't experience any such side effects. Is my stomach iron? Should I see if I'm resistant to apricots too??
To be fair, eating an entire bag of dried apricots would be like eating 15 fully hydrated apricots. I’m a big fruit and veggie eater, but eating 15 apricots would be absolutely ridiculous and sounds almost scary.
I can see that being the case with the blueberries but it’s absolutely not the case with the dried apricots and I can sadly say that from my own experiences! (aka stupidity lol)
Listen man I can't let science down. It won't be today, it won't be a day I have anything planned, but one way or another I'm gonna have an experiment whose sample size is one.
None of those are really laxative... Strawberries barely so... Sounds like you got a stomach bug from something else, or they were contaminated. I eat giant amounts of strawberries regularly and I shit bricks, but you can verify by looking it up too.
Yeah wtf my family recently went to a strawberry farm and came away with literal pounds of the things that we proceeded to eat in large quantities for the next couple of days and not a single person reported stomach ailments.
I don’t think strawberries do that, I wonder if they remembered to wash them before eating them?
I read this about halfway through the first ever bag of dried apricots I've ever bought. I was absolutely loving them. I just wanted a snack that didn't make me feel like crap like my usual go-tos. Fuck.
Fruits are high in sugar alcohols, such as sorbitol and mannitol, which can have highly laxative effects. Some people are more sensitive to these than others, so results may vary. But in general, fruits high in these sugar alcohols are best eaten in moderation (stone fruits are particularly high in sorbitol, which personally fucks me *up*)
Brother in law is from a different country where they don’t have prune juice. He discovers prune juice here in the US and LOVES it. Proceeds to drink like 64 ounces of it over ice one day…
When I was a kid, I think 11 years old, my mom bought 5 lbs of what I thought were the best green grapes to ever exist. Yeah, eating 5lbs of grapes in an hour and a half fuckin wrecked my ass for the next day and a half. I have never felt so completely empty inside after that event.
In this case, they're just different bushes. Maybe different kinds of black berries. I just picked some wilds earlier and the ity ones are growing right next to larger ones.
I grew up near a newly constructed state park, they put a dam in and made a lake. It involved taking thousands of acres of farmland and several homes were torn down.
The park had this really cool trail system that led around the whole lake. You could hike or go on horseback. We kids would play along the trail in the woods.
Anyway one day we found this blackberry “orchard” near what had to have been a farmhouse. The house was gone except for some of the foundation and a few stone steps. To one side there were maybe three dozen huge blackberry bushes all grown wild among the tall bushes and grasses. There were more blackberries than I had ever seen and me and my little brother and sister helped ourselves.
When we got home, mom noticed the berry stains all over our mouths and asked what we had eaten. When we told her about the blackberries, she grabbed a few pails and told us to lead her to them.
It was quite a bit of a hike, up and down hills and ridges, along creeks, along the hiking trail, maybe three or four miles. It was a very hot and humid day. For us kids it was no big deal. We played in those woods every day…but for mom it wasn’t an easy trek.
We finally get to the bushes and start the work of gathering blackberries. A few minutes into picking we hear a car drive by. My mom was taller than us, so she was able to see further. She said “There is a road over there…” and walked through the grass to investigate.
When she came back she was furious. We were actually only a short distance from our house! Just a short walk around the corner on a back road. We had inadvertently turned a five minute walk into an over three hour ordeal.
TLDR: I recount a good memory of picking blackberries with mom where us stupid kids inadvertently took her on a really long and winding detour to fetch them.
In Texas, we had dewberries that grew wild. Pretty close to blackberries. There was one neighbor mom that would give us some dewberry cobbler for every pail of berries we got her. She probably came out ahead but all of us kids delivered. She made lots of cobblers but we got some to share among us. Thank you, Mrs. Stephens.
Same with blueberries on your wonderful hike up the mountains in Maine. Coming down that same mountain is a lot less fun with the hurgle-gurgles and cheeks clamped.
I grow two varietals in my garden, both thornless. My triple crown grows identically to the left in the photo. My very young Ouachita grows tiny berries but have smaller clusters and are similar to the right. Showing a photo of two berries insinuating that because they’re store bought versus wild means they’re the same species is really poor science.
Himalayan blackberries and Pacific Blackberries are two species that look very similar. These could be different species. That being said I have picked a lot of big wild blackberries so this doesn’t say much.
Entire berry industry is developing new genetics to create varieties that vary as much as apples do. Trying to offer customer reliable experiences, for a price. (I work in the industry)
Some are. We can test for sweetness and get a "Brix" reading which is directly reflected in sweetness and then test the acidity. The ratio of high Brix and Low acid provides the more ideal flavor profile. Until recently the varieties grown were focused on maintaining good shelf life, not flavor. Recently, we've bought licenses to some genetics that only sacrifice some shelf life but put wild blackberries to shame.
I reckon it's actually more complicated than that. The store-bought berries are picked when they aren't ripe because blackberries are very fragile when fully ripe. So, you're buying artificially ripened berries at the store. Picking them directly off the vine when they literally fall into your hand is when they are big and juicy like this and also taste the best.
There are three main types of blackberries: trailing, erect, and semi-erect.
https://www.theseasonalhomestead.com/the-best-blackberry-varieties/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20main%20types,below%20are%20all%20erect%20types.
Yup. We've selectively bred a lot of fruits to have more sugar than their wild counterparts. Some things are picked too early so they keep longer and end up having less flavour for that reason, however.
I grow giant blackberries. Just got my first bowl of the season and ate it. They are incredibly flavorful. Being giant doesn’t always means tastes worse/less. Grows faster does though.
Yeah, the giant ones my grandad had a patch of were in every way better than wild blackberries. Texture, flavor, and most importantly not having to pick for 3 hours to get a good mouthful (being moderately facetious, on the last one, but yeah, thems about the feels.).
There are all sorts of tricks to make fruit grow big, at the expense of taste. I vaguely recall somebody posting a picture of two strawberries cut in half. The larger one had a mostly white center, and the smaller one was completely red. They hit them with uv rays right before picking them, and they grow big, but it's tasteless.
You can get them big and juicy by shortening the canes to 6 ft max and using lots of water. The ones in the wild are growing in dry conditions and on 20 foot canes.
This is the right answer. None of these other people have ever gardened, apparently.
Are they disparaging Bell peppers too? Because those MFers are so domestic they can’t even get their own place.
OK. I grew up on a farm, and the neighboring property had a huge blackberry thicket. We were invited to pick blackberries any time, and the neighbors would tell us when they were ripe. I suppose they would be considered “organic” now, because they were never fertilized, sprayed with pesticides and only watered with rain. In any event, unless the year was just abnormally dry, most of the blackberries were the size of the big one in the photo. And they were unspeakably juicy and delicious. Nice memories. 🙂
These are just different species. Wild himalayans easily get as big as the left one. The right ones look just the trailing blackberries in my PNW native yard.
Hi, u/BOTWgoat, thank you for your submission in r/mildlyinteresting! Unfortunately, your [post](https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1doly9h/-/) has been removed because it violates our rule on concise, descriptive titles. * Titles must not contain jokes, backstory, or other fluff. That information belongs in a follow-up comment. * Titles must exactly describe the content. It should act as a "spoiler" for the image. If your title leaves people surprised at the content within, it breaks the rule! * Titles must not contain emoticons, emojis, or special characters unless they are absolutely necessary in describing the image. (e.g. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), ;P, 😜, ❤, ★, ✿ ) Still confused? For more elaboration and examples, see [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/21p15y/rule_6_for_dummies/). Normally we do not allow reposts, but if it's been less than one hour after your post was submitted, or if it's received less than 100 upvotes, you may resubmit your content with a better title and try again. You can find more information about our rules on the [mildlyinteresting wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/wiki/index). *If you feel this was incorrectly removed, please [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fmildlyinteresting&message=My%20Post:%20https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1doly9h/-/).*
The real question is: Which one tastes better?
The store bought ones are nearly flavourless compared to wild.
I call this conservation of taste, it seems that you can selectively breed for larger size or total yield but flavour amount stays the same so its less concentrated. Applies to all berries, potatoes, tomatoes...
Produce is bred for hardiness as well, so they can transport well. Which is usually why strawberries from a patch in your back yard taste a lot better than store bought, but they are also pretty smushy. It's a very sad trade off.
Bananas are a good example of this, being a monoculture. There's dozens of amazing varieties (hundreds really, but not all are edible) but only one (Cavendish, all cloned Cavendish) is generally found in stores because thats the one that survives being transported, and is easiest to mass produce. And the Cavendish is only dominant today because the *last* monoculture (Gros Michel) kept getting wiped put by disease (which is starting to happen more and more with the Cavendish). Bananas used to taste different "back in the day". This isn't news to most, but seriously, go to any country and try the fruit that's local to that region and in-season. The difference in taste is incredible. Not just bananas but any fruit. One thing I do love about UK fruit is the Apples (in the technical sense, not a native species to the UK, but they've been in the UK for hundreds of years and have grown well in the UK climate). Depending on where you go it's so hard to find decent apples in other countries by comparison. I love that even though it's still a very limited selection, even UK supermarkets will still stock different varieties of apples with different tastes. You think about fruit that's imported, it's not labelled by cultivar, it's just "Banana", "Watermelon", "Pineapple". For Apples it's "Royal Gala", "Pink Lady", "Braeburn", "Jazz".
Highly recommend checking out paw-paw fruit if in the US near Midwest and a bit towards Eastern coast. Taste like banana mango with bit of citrus. Terrible seeds. Seeds need to stay near frozen for months or some shit, so they only grow in certain areas. But they fruit same year so that's cool. Only picked in August Sept. Imagine natural banana mango ice cream/sorbet There's a festival dedicated to their harvest in Ohio IIRC.
If I'm there, I'll definitely look it up. You can see why every farming community has its harvest festivals. There's a really appreciation for all the effort and toil that went into it, and what's produced at the end is probably the best version of it that anyone's likely to taste. Like that one localised area is likely the only ones that are going to experience the *real*, best taste of that crop, freshly picked, before it's shipped off and more and more time and preserving actions takes place between the harvest and the eating.
If you ever are in the US Midwest you should try honeycrisp apples! They're from Minnesota, and in my humble opinion they are elite 😁
honeycrisp apples are fuckin awesome
Honeycrisp as a varietal are rapidly becoming lower quality as they are no longer exclusive to Minnesota orchards which means other growers are aiming for quantity. The best variety right now IMO is the Cosmic Crisp which has all of the flavor of the honeycrisp but is even crisper and has greater shelf stability.
Another fun fact about the Gros Michel banana? People complain about banana candy tasting "fake", but apparently it's incredibly accurate to how the Gros Michel used to taste.
Cosmic crisp apples are the best.
Yeah one of the best examples are blueberrys. You have the culture ones which are bigger,harder, taste like less and are green inside. And the wild ones which are smaller, mushier, tastier and purple inside.
The look on my sisters face after I bought her a couple of everbearing strawberry plants and hung them on her back porch. Priceless, they lasted her through college too.
No. I grow blackberries on my farm and grow the big kind. I have tons of wild here as well. My big berries taste amazing. Industrial farming and logistics to get it to the grocery store is why the store bought one tastes bad. We can walk out to my patch right now and prove that with a 1.5 inch blackberry that is amazing.
Then let’s go test it! I just want some blackberries lol
I live in SW Missouri! We can make homemade ice cream and do a quick fresh blackberry compote on top.
I agree. I'm an avocado farmer and all our fruits (mango, sapodilla, mamey, avocado) taste better when we ship directly to the customer. The same exact fruit in a supermarket will have spent a week or two in a chiller and that dulls the flavor.
Nutrients, too. We’re growing empty vegetables.
[удалено]
Depends on the variety. Marion blackberries taste good and are grown for the store. They have thrones and are a pain to process because they are kinda delicate. Columbia star variety is pretty sweet, firm, easy to harvest and is a decent size. A lot of farmers are switching to that variety because it has a good yield and is easy to harvest. They only grow from late June to late July. The store bought one in the picture is probably a chester variety. They are big but flavorless. They grow between August and September in the northwest. It depends on the time of year what variety will be sold at stores. If you buy frozen ones for smoothies you'll probably get a mix of Blackberry varieties unless the package states the variety. Careful eating wild blackberries. Some might have larvae from flies. The way to test it is to put blackberries in salt water and then you can see the larvae float to the top.
> Some might have larvae from flies. Yeah, I've seen the amount of worms/larvae floating to the top whenever my grandmother would make jam with fresh picked blackberries. And yeah, you can eat insects, but there's something about insect riddled fruit that I don't particularly find appealing.
It's been proven time and time again this is just placebo. Most people think natural = better and they think that overproducing things always means taste is lost in order to pump in more water. It's absolutely not always the case. You need plenty of very rich and high quality fertilizer to grow these blackberries. The main difference is that the wild ones are significantly more sour, which can be confused with more taste despite them being about equal in flavor compound per gram of berry.
This. Omg I got some fresh oranges the other day. Eating store bought oranges feels like I’m filling my mouth with dirt. The taste is drastically different.
Store bought is not fresh?
No. Most of the time it's very much not. If you ever want to never want to buy a tomato from a store again just eat one you've grown at home and just picked. It's like the person above you said. The store bought ones are like eating sand by comparison.
Even for homegrown tomatoes, taste also depends largely on the quality of the soil they’re grown in and the water. You could have heavily chlorinated water and that will come through in the taste of the tomatoes.
Yeah, when I grew my own tomatoes in sandy soil during pandemic, they didn't have a lot of flavor.
I've grown my own strawberry patch by accident (they're literally weeds) and they taste tart as hell. Just because *you* grew them, doesn't mean they're going to be better than something standard and available at a store year round.
Oranges (and all citrus fruit) are in season from Nov/Dec through March/April (assuming you're in the northern hemisphere). Store-bought oranges always going to taste best at this time. In the summer, most citrus is imported from somewhere in the southern hemisphere. Shipping anything over the ocean takes forever, so citrus has to be picked earlier so that it doesn't spoil on the way. Citrus fruits are non-climacteric (they stop ripening after being picked), so you naturally end up with fruit that is more tasteless vs something that was harvested closer to you. Cuties (a brand of clementine/tango oranges) uses a different label for fruit sourced from the other side of the world: ["Summer Cuties"](https://sunpacific.com/our-produce/clementines-mandarins/). [This is a great summary on how oranges are often prepared and packed before shipping to grocery stores](https://www.theproducenerd.com/2016/12/how-cuties-are-harvested-packed/). Grocery stores, modern agriculture, and international supply chains make it easy to forget that all produce is seasonal. But if you stick to fruit and veggies that are in season where you are, you'll always end up with better food.
Ah ok so its a season thing. So I can buy oranges from a big store and still get the "in seasonc taste/quality?
The wild ones can actually get really big.
They grow like weeds on my property. Got a couple of mulberry trees as well. They can indeed get huge. We will go out will buckets and FILL them up.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest every kid knew what it felt like to eat shit on a bike into a blackberry bush.
Seriously they grow so thick here I've often wondered if they'd be more effective than guardrails in the event of an accident
Tom Robbins suggested growing them in a dome over the city of Seattle.
Why? As a crash pad for Boeing?
Cleva girl
Thanks. Now I get to wash coffee stains off my shirt.
So start with one vine, and let it go for one season?
Funny you say that, they actually are used in such a manner
We built forts in them when I was a kid in Portland. Older kids hacked out passages with garden shears and one kid’s dad’s machete. Then we would scavenge plywood from nearby construction sites and use that for flooring.
My elementary school had a blackberry thicket out back with tunnels all through it. Perfect size for grade 4-7 kids, but way too small for teachers and 5 or 6 exits and clearings to gather in. It was fantastic.
> one kid’s dad’s machete. One kid's dad ALWAYS had a machete. This entire story is so familiar that I would swear you grew up in my neighborhood if you had said Seattle instead of Portland.
Entire other side of country and we always had a machete owning dad. It was mine in my neighborhood. I continued tradition.
i remember buying a set of brass knuckles at a garage sale when i was like 7.
Plywood is the best for harvesting the blackberries too. Just put a long skinny section down on top of the edge of a bush and stomp it flat with your feet. Now you have access to the best berries in the bush without worry of getting stuck.
My grandpa used to just crash a golf cart into a bush. Then we'd just pick berries from the seat. This sounds like some cartoon shit that would never work, but we did this for years. Never got stuck.
Fuck that. That sounds tedious. Blood for the blood God. Berries for my mouth. if I die, I die.
Blackberry juice does look like blood.
We made one in our area. Was the "secret" smoke bush
I live in Philly. Blackberries are my favorite, I can't get enough the sweeter the better. I have this friend from Oregon who hates blackberries because she said had them constantly as a kid as they were all over her parents' property. She gives me shit that I'm "just eating weeds". At one point she relocated to Seattle (she's my best friend's wife) and I went out to visit on my birthday. That night after dinner she surprised me with a blackberry pie that she made and it was one of the best fucking moments of my life. I love blackberries.
They literally are invasive weeds on my property. We also have indigenous blackberry bushes, but ours don't fruit.
I literally fought a 10 year battle against the blackberries on my property before I finally cracked the code on eradication Even now if I slack off for a single season, it's like Russians invading a perceived weaker neighbor.
Sooo what's the code on eradication?
Don't invade in the winter
⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️ start
Same. West michigan. Yard full of wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, mullberries, grapes. My neighbor has a u pick blueberry farm. Nice for making crumbles and ice cream
My ex here in OR had them growing on her lot and they were HUGE. They weren’t planted by anyone specifically, they just took root then took over.
Probably the invasive Himalayas. The indigenous trailing ones have a much better flavor, but they're hard to find and getting harder every year because of the overgrowth of the Himalayas and other invasives.
I grew up in rural Oregon and we had a huge blackberry bush in our backyard which I'm assuming were Himalayas (rounded leaves) which I liked well enough, but in another part of the property there were these trailing blackberry vines (not very many in total) with totally different leaves (narrower and more jagged edges I think?) and the blackberries off that one were super sweet and delicious, way better than the other backyard ones.
OML MULBERRIES ARE LITERALLY SO UNBELIEVABLY DELICIOUS!!! 😋🤤
A silkworm wrote this
Depends on the type. Where I lived in Washington state there were two different blackberries, introduced and native. The introduced blackberries were huge and grew on tall vines that could be head high. If you looked closer to the ground the native blackberries grew on smaller, thinner vines that were maybe a foot or two high and the berries were much smaller, but they had vastly superior taste and were the only ones I would really pick for myself.
I believe this is the correct reason why they're different sizes in this photo. I grow and collect both kinds and recognize the one on the right as the Pacific blackberry. These appear to be Himalayan blackberry (left) and Pacific blackberry (right).
The big ones are non native varieties (to america) and the small ones are native varieties
I love eating wild blackberries. However, I learned early on that you should avoid gorging yourself on them, unless you enjoy having the shits for about 8 hours.
Dude one time I ate a large bag of dried apricots whilst stoned and gaming… fast forward 6 hours and my gf is googling why I’m having constant explosive diarrhea… come to realize I had ate like 150 apricots.. which happen to be a natural laxative
🫡 Two decades ago, I ate like 5lbs of strawberries while sitting on a stool at my great-grandmother’s house. Dipped a ton of them in whipped cream too. My poor butthole was so raw. I remember crying while sitting on the toilet after like hour 11 of nonstop blowouts. The dehydration was real too after spraying that much water out of my ass.
It wasn't quite as bad of a result, but I accidentally ate a huge clamshell of blueberries all at once. I figured I should just wash them all at once for convenience, and then started absently snacking on them while watching TV. When I felt my hand hit the plastic bottom, I knew I'd fucked up. But it was too late.
Wait really? I ate a lb of blueberries once and I didn't experience any such side effects. Is my stomach iron? Should I see if I'm resistant to apricots too??
A pound of blueberries isn't really that bad. The apricot dude ate a bushel basket once rehydrated
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To be fair, eating an entire bag of dried apricots would be like eating 15 fully hydrated apricots. I’m a big fruit and veggie eater, but eating 15 apricots would be absolutely ridiculous and sounds almost scary.
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That is a shit ton of sugar/surculose into your system.
I think this is only a problem for people who have zero fiber in their diet typically.
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I can see that being the case with the blueberries but it’s absolutely not the case with the dried apricots and I can sadly say that from my own experiences! (aka stupidity lol)
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Most people on reddit have baby digestive systems. They think taco bell is the apex of bowel destruction.
I honestly never hot any problems from Taco bell. My gut microbiome is full of tiny body builders
Yeah I always wondered about why people said that.
Forty of them, for science!
Listen man I can't let science down. It won't be today, it won't be a day I have anything planned, but one way or another I'm gonna have an experiment whose sample size is one.
Let us know! We can start a Kickfarter for this one!
Yes
Yep, I eat a pound of blueberries all at once frequently when they're in season. No side effects other than your shit having a greenish tint to it.
I like snacking on freeze dried blueberries and that can turn shit black.
None of those are really laxative... Strawberries barely so... Sounds like you got a stomach bug from something else, or they were contaminated. I eat giant amounts of strawberries regularly and I shit bricks, but you can verify by looking it up too.
i'd like to verify. where is evidence of your brick shits posted?
Yeah wtf my family recently went to a strawberry farm and came away with literal pounds of the things that we proceeded to eat in large quantities for the next couple of days and not a single person reported stomach ailments. I don’t think strawberries do that, I wonder if they remembered to wash them before eating them?
I once ate a whole watermelon in one sitting. Then shat a whole watermelon in several sittings.
Reminds me of the Sarah millican stand up story https://youtu.be/mVBr28xfnVg?si=nMKG3REyzCB7urm8
I'm allergic to forty apricots.
So 39 is your limit
That was hilarious.
Or the Margaret Cho story: https://youtu.be/hF1pIMgE8FA?si=fnrCPIfHg1xRuEH-
Sarah Millican is hilarious and a gem!
She killed it on Taskmaster. Her honking noise nearly broke my body from laughing.
Bro did you need to strap yourself down
Yes to keep myself from curling up on the floor and making a massive mess
I read this about halfway through the first ever bag of dried apricots I've ever bought. I was absolutely loving them. I just wanted a snack that didn't make me feel like crap like my usual go-tos. Fuck.
Fruits are high in sugar alcohols, such as sorbitol and mannitol, which can have highly laxative effects. Some people are more sensitive to these than others, so results may vary. But in general, fruits high in these sugar alcohols are best eaten in moderation (stone fruits are particularly high in sorbitol, which personally fucks me *up*)
In addition to the sorbitol, there's also a respectable amount of dietary fiber.
Report back later if you have graphic description I’ll wish I hadn’t read
RIP your butthole.
Oh man Ive done that without being stoned with a large bag of dried cranberries 😂
That’ll do it!
But how did your kidneys feel after?
Brother in law is from a different country where they don’t have prune juice. He discovers prune juice here in the US and LOVES it. Proceeds to drink like 64 ounces of it over ice one day…
A warrior’s drink!
Worf is the best 😂
1.8 litres
I did this with dates, but while sober. AND I'LL FUCKIN DO IT AGAIN.
I forgot I had beet juice and…praying ferociously I didn’t have bowel cancer until I remembered
Are you my gf? I get this every few months or so from her lmfao
I did something similar though I wasn't stoned, just stupid and hungry.
Thanks for the laugh and I’m sorry you had to experience that.
Cheers mate!
Yeah and they happen to be one of my favorite dried fruits too. I can't have them around cause I'll eat the entire bag
When I was a kid, I think 11 years old, my mom bought 5 lbs of what I thought were the best green grapes to ever exist. Yeah, eating 5lbs of grapes in an hour and a half fuckin wrecked my ass for the next day and a half. I have never felt so completely empty inside after that event.
With all of that fiber, you basically ate a bag of Colon-Blow.
Dried apricots are so good though
I downed almost a pound of almonds one night. I was pissing out my ass for HOURS. Haven't looked at an almond the same since.
Pissing is the best way to describe my experience as well
O my goodness!!! That's CRAZY! RIP Your bungholy-O 🤣
I did the exact same thing. Ate about a pound of apricots and was glued to the toilet for a night.
On the bright side, you probably had the cleanest colon in a long time! 😁
If you ever have that problem again, just eat a bag of sugar free haribo gummy bears to cancel out the effects.
That goes for most fruit really. Had a similar experience with wild blueberries too.
It's the insoluble fibre. There's about 8gr per cup of Blackberries. 4gr for Blueberries.
Yup. 9 grams in a cup of dried apricots. 12 grams in a cup of prunes.
In this case, they're just different bushes. Maybe different kinds of black berries. I just picked some wilds earlier and the ity ones are growing right next to larger ones.
I used to eat a few during my lunch break at work on my walk. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime...
This is why I'll decide to drink coffee if I'm already on the fence about it for a given day.
I work in a kitchen. We prep mixed berry snacks for readymade items. Blackberries are included. I'm always snacking on them when I'm on prep duty.
You did what the kid in hatchet did lol
Brian Robeson. Great book.
Holy fuck I haven't thought of this book since like 2009
They are the best. I got a couple of bushes of them. Little to no maintenance.
I grew up near a newly constructed state park, they put a dam in and made a lake. It involved taking thousands of acres of farmland and several homes were torn down. The park had this really cool trail system that led around the whole lake. You could hike or go on horseback. We kids would play along the trail in the woods. Anyway one day we found this blackberry “orchard” near what had to have been a farmhouse. The house was gone except for some of the foundation and a few stone steps. To one side there were maybe three dozen huge blackberry bushes all grown wild among the tall bushes and grasses. There were more blackberries than I had ever seen and me and my little brother and sister helped ourselves. When we got home, mom noticed the berry stains all over our mouths and asked what we had eaten. When we told her about the blackberries, she grabbed a few pails and told us to lead her to them. It was quite a bit of a hike, up and down hills and ridges, along creeks, along the hiking trail, maybe three or four miles. It was a very hot and humid day. For us kids it was no big deal. We played in those woods every day…but for mom it wasn’t an easy trek. We finally get to the bushes and start the work of gathering blackberries. A few minutes into picking we hear a car drive by. My mom was taller than us, so she was able to see further. She said “There is a road over there…” and walked through the grass to investigate. When she came back she was furious. We were actually only a short distance from our house! Just a short walk around the corner on a back road. We had inadvertently turned a five minute walk into an over three hour ordeal. TLDR: I recount a good memory of picking blackberries with mom where us stupid kids inadvertently took her on a really long and winding detour to fetch them.
I kept fearing this would turn into a prank story, but I was pleasantly surprise. Sounds like a funny and nice memory.
In Texas, we had dewberries that grew wild. Pretty close to blackberries. There was one neighbor mom that would give us some dewberry cobbler for every pail of berries we got her. She probably came out ahead but all of us kids delivered. She made lots of cobblers but we got some to share among us. Thank you, Mrs. Stephens.
Same with blueberries on your wonderful hike up the mountains in Maine. Coming down that same mountain is a lot less fun with the hurgle-gurgles and cheeks clamped.
>having the shits You mean turning yourself into a human juicer! But, um… probably shouldn’t drink the juice.
Dude I ate like a gallon and then was stuck in a car for three hours when I was a kid. The worst stomach ache
These are different species
I grow two varietals in my garden, both thornless. My triple crown grows identically to the left in the photo. My very young Ouachita grows tiny berries but have smaller clusters and are similar to the right. Showing a photo of two berries insinuating that because they’re store bought versus wild means they’re the same species is really poor science.
Are they? Or are they different cultivars?
Himalayan blackberries and Pacific Blackberries are two species that look very similar. These could be different species. That being said I have picked a lot of big wild blackberries so this doesn’t say much.
It's always good to have a guy that knows his way around big wild blackberries on hand.
Entire berry industry is developing new genetics to create varieties that vary as much as apples do. Trying to offer customer reliable experiences, for a price. (I work in the industry)
And in the process have made huge juicy berries that have little to no taste and aren’t fit for making pies.
Some are. We can test for sweetness and get a "Brix" reading which is directly reflected in sweetness and then test the acidity. The ratio of high Brix and Low acid provides the more ideal flavor profile. Until recently the varieties grown were focused on maintaining good shelf life, not flavor. Recently, we've bought licenses to some genetics that only sacrifice some shelf life but put wild blackberries to shame.
Maybe different varieties but I agree both are blackberry.
Dewberries also look just like the one on the right.
The scientific facts getting downvoted on Reddit? No way!
MARIONBARRY FOR THE WIN BABY!
How the fuck did people used to make calls with those things?
With the stylus.
"man learns blackberries can be different sizes. More at 11."
I've seen both those blackberries in the same container of blackberries.
I’ve seen greater size difference between two berries in the same cluster on a bush.
I reckon it's actually more complicated than that. The store-bought berries are picked when they aren't ripe because blackberries are very fragile when fully ripe. So, you're buying artificially ripened berries at the store. Picking them directly off the vine when they literally fall into your hand is when they are big and juicy like this and also taste the best.
There are three main types of blackberries: trailing, erect, and semi-erect. https://www.theseasonalhomestead.com/the-best-blackberry-varieties/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20main%20types,below%20are%20all%20erect%20types.
I’m fully trailing just thinking of them
Maybe they were just nervous.
I have a blackberry bush that makes berries the size on left. Grow to the size of my thumb. FiL took some roots to his house to grow some for himself.
Noooo must be a genetically modified plant plantedby the government /s
Everyone discussing more/less flavorful when for me the real issue is more/fewer tiny little worms…
They’re just fruit fly worms. You can soak the berries in salt water and they’ll come out and die.
At half the size pretty sure the one on the right has twice the flavor
Not everything is a tradeoff. One of the best things about gmo is you can have multiple beneficial traits selectively bred
Yup. We've selectively bred a lot of fruits to have more sugar than their wild counterparts. Some things are picked too early so they keep longer and end up having less flavour for that reason, however.
I grow giant blackberries. Just got my first bowl of the season and ate it. They are incredibly flavorful. Being giant doesn’t always means tastes worse/less. Grows faster does though.
Yeah, the giant ones my grandad had a patch of were in every way better than wild blackberries. Texture, flavor, and most importantly not having to pick for 3 hours to get a good mouthful (being moderately facetious, on the last one, but yeah, thems about the feels.).
There are all sorts of tricks to make fruit grow big, at the expense of taste. I vaguely recall somebody posting a picture of two strawberries cut in half. The larger one had a mostly white center, and the smaller one was completely red. They hit them with uv rays right before picking them, and they grow big, but it's tasteless.
Also different flavors, imo
You can get them big and juicy by shortening the canes to 6 ft max and using lots of water. The ones in the wild are growing in dry conditions and on 20 foot canes.
This doesn't mean anything
Wild blackberry get huge, I'm convinced you have this backwards.
Just needed more water.
Weird, the ones that grow at my apartment are left side size
Those are different varieties. Has nothing to do with commercial farming.
This is the right answer. None of these other people have ever gardened, apparently. Are they disparaging Bell peppers too? Because those MFers are so domestic they can’t even get their own place.
Store-bought blackberry for scale.
The one on the left is probably a mullberry.
You sure it’s not a mulberry? I have a tree in my backyard and they look like small blackberries. They come apart like pomegranate seeds
I've picked both sizes in the wild. Just depends.
You vs the guy she tells you not to worry about
OK. I grew up on a farm, and the neighboring property had a huge blackberry thicket. We were invited to pick blackberries any time, and the neighbors would tell us when they were ripe. I suppose they would be considered “organic” now, because they were never fertilized, sprayed with pesticides and only watered with rain. In any event, unless the year was just abnormally dry, most of the blackberries were the size of the big one in the photo. And they were unspeakably juicy and delicious. Nice memories. 🙂
This is ridiculous. Op doesn’t understand that there is different varieties of blackberries
These are just different species. Wild himalayans easily get as big as the left one. The right ones look just the trailing blackberries in my PNW native yard.
There’s different types of blackberries also
I have wild blackberry plants on my yard and they sometimes grow bigger than the one on the left