How to make a Berry Apron
Long-time readers will be aware that our
movie-star neighbor loves to harvest Autumn
Olive berries,
which he freezes for the winter and also turns into delicious fruit
leather.
His farm is overrun with the invasive bush, so he only has to walk
a few feet from his door to pick, but that picking can be
time-consuming. So this year, our neighbor developed the
Berry Apron, a DIY picking tool to make his harvests even
easier. You can follow along at home.
The first step is to
take a length of PVC pipe like you'd use for quick
hoops and thread a rope through it. It's even better
if the pipe has already been used for quick hoops and has
developed a bend. Using this bend (or what you envision the
bend would be) as a guide, sew a channel into an old sheet (the
same way you'd make the top of a curtain fit over a curtain rod),
then push the pipe (with its embedded rope) through. Tie the
ends of the rope 
together to pull the pipe
into a solid curve, then make a hole at the peak of the pipe's
curve to attach another rope, which will go around your
neck. Finally, use a bungee cord to secure the Berry Apron
around your back, and you're ready to pick.
The great thing about
the Berry Apron, my neighbor reports, is that it lets you pick
with both hands at once without worrying about channeling the
berries into a bucket. He and Nellie (pictured above)
plucked about two gallons of Autumn Olive berries into their Berry
Aprons in about half an hour, and he could envision using the same
aprons with highbush blueberries or any other non-thorny bush
berry.
I'll be curious to
hear if anyone else tries the Berry Apron and streamlines the
process. Our neighbor was already thinking that version 2.0
might be made with a screen instead of cloth, so bugs and dirt
fall through. Any other suggestions to make this good idea
even better?
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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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When sewing up the apron, adding a bit of material so the apron naturally forms a shallow cone will direct berries into the middle so the weight settles evenly and you don't lose any stragglers off the edge of the apron before it fill up.
Then, in the center, you could add a drawstring closure (like you see in a drawstring shoulder bag. When the apron is full you position yourself over the bucket, open the drawstring and now you have a berry funnel. Very quick and no spillage.
Added bonus comes with bushes or fruits you can shake out of the tree, into the funnel, and directly into ready buckets.
Another quick way to harvest autumn olive berries is to put a tarp under the heaviest laden branches, rake your hands through the fruit, catching it in the tarp. Then pour it into a 5 gal. "sheetrock" bucket. Tarps & buckets areso useful around the homestead, a blessing of our plastic era.