Rainy Day and the Blackberry Tree

Blackberry Tree

Rainy Day is a happy camper! After all the fuss and frustration of people being unable to leave comments without going through a PhD program and signing on for only-Google-knows-how-many things, she found a 'fix.' Disqus, a third party fixer has been downloaded/uploaded/glued in place. Now friends of Rainy Day should have NO problem leaving comments. Rainy Day apologizes for Google for fixing something that was never broken and turning it into a mess; however, one should now be able to leave comments, thanks to Disqus, with ease;-)

Now, back to the regularly scheduled programming.

Rainy Day loves well-maintained lawns and gardens – as long as she doesn't have to do the maintaining. She thinks she would like doing gardening, getting her hands dirty, getting close to Mother Earth, all that wonderful stuff. Alas, Rainy Day is allergic. She spends ten minutes outside, hands in the dirt, and all that Mother Earth stuff, and she can't breathe. Oh, it would be so nice if she could just take a pill, and be able to breathe again. Alas, the pills that really work are now verboten by her doctor. The others ones put her to sleep. The ones that don't put her to sleep really don't work all that wonderfully, either.

When Rainy Day bought her house a few years ago, she was thrilled to find a settled yard that was, relatively speaking,  low maintenance. She hired someone to come in and mow the lawn weekly (and she makes sure all the doors and windows are closed while they do this!), and she enjoys the fruits of their labors.

She discovered a prior owner planted raspberries and blackberries (no thorns!) and left them for her to pick and freeze the fruit as it ripens. When fall comes, and Rainy Day and two of her Sisters of Choice come from across the mountains, they use all the frozen fruit they have each collected all summer to make jams.

She has one real garden. It is even fenced off from the rest of the yard. It belongs to the birds. They plant the seeds and they harvest the fruit. Well, they get most of the fruit. Now, some very strange things have shown up in that garden – sorrel, chives, sunflowers, and a blackberry tree! Yes, you read that correctly – a blackberry tree.

Rainy Day had never seen such a thing as a blackberry tree, so she immediately called her friend, Becky, who is a Master Gardener and knows everything there is to know when it comes to plants. She laughed and told Rainy Day she had a mulberry tree, not a blackberry tree. And, yes, the mulberries are edible (but pretty tasteless). Rainy Day now collects mulberries to add to the fruit for jam. She hears, from an impeccable source (Maura's Mom), that though they have very little flavor, they play well when mixed with other fruits.

Rainy Day still isn't 100% convinced it's a Mulberry Tree, though. No matter how often she checks, she never finds any silk worms.

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