Rob and I write a lot of story's of our child hood and our hunting and fishing latter in life posted here.
http://thunderbucks.com/tbforum/index.php?board=34.0This is one of his and I chose it to share because he mentioned the yellow jackets.
More of the 50’s and 60’s
We had a lot of blackberry patch on our farm. They were the wild ones which in my opinion tasted better. It was all natural no pesticide or unnatural fertilizers. Mom would take a nice day and make a picnic lunch for us and we would go to the blackberry patches located on our 80. The 80 was about a mile from the house. We would walk down there. There were some nice apple trees along the way so we would get some apples to go with our lunch. Mind you back then we didn’t have the nice small coolers they have now a days. We didn’t even have a cooler. If we had something that needed to be kept cool we would put it in the creek that ran through the property. We did have a jug we would put Kool aid in. We would pick berries for most of the day and would end up with a couple of milk pails (about 5 quarts each) full of berries. Mom would make blackberry pies, jam, and dumplings and as a special treat blackberry pancakes. The berries we got back then were as big as or bigger than the ones you buy in a store now days.
One particular trip we were picking berries and having a real good time when my sister Joan stepped on a
yellow jacket nest. Luckily for her she didn’t get stung a whole lot. But it was enough so we had to call it a day. A lot of the times we would be ready to pick berries and would go when we would drive the cows down for pasturing there. We could usually have enough berries in a couple of hours when they were all ripe. I go back to those patches now but the berries seem a lot smaller and they are in different areas. But they still taste just as good.
Al
