It's been an excellent year for wild blackberries. I accidentally let a huge patch grow up in the one part of our core homestead that we haven't managed to reclaim (and which will probably be turned into goat pasture eventually). The soil is quite fertile there, but it's bad for gardening because the spot is simply too shady for most vegetables. Blackberries, though, don't seem to mind.

While tromping through the thorns picking dessert, I also stumbled across the same grape vine I've been noticing then forgetting about for the last ten years. It was growing on the west side of the old house and soon disappeared into the weeds when the house came down.

Based on the leaf shape, my gut feeling was that the grape was a cultivated variety. But I wasn't positive until I found fruits nearly an inch in diameter hidden amid the briars last week. Here's hoping I can remember to hunt them back down in a month or so when they're ripe...and maybe take a cutting since this variety definitely seems to shrug off everything from blights to beetles to weeds while still producing a crop.

(No picture of the grapes themselves --- sorry! I didn't have the camera when I found them and didn't want to wade back in there once I was suitably equipped. But I think these leaves came from the same plant....maybe.)

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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