Butte Blackberries

The berries at Webb Ranch are at their peak--at least the raspberries and Butte blackberries (a fairly new variety of blackberry that weighs twice as much as regular blackberries). We went down there on Thursday morning to do some picking. The parking lot was full of cars, and the rows of canes were filled with moms with sunhats and kids with berry baskets. My son and his friend headed with one of the wagons to the far end of the blackberries and worked their way up through the row, while me and my friend worked the raspberries. The raspberries are small and it takes a lot of work to fill a basket, but they are dark red and intensely flavored, nothing like those thumb-sized, bland raspberries that disappoint me at the supermarket. After half an hour I had only filled two baskets--and eaten many others, warm and soft from the sun. I love sitting on the ground and smelling the hot dried grass, watching the black tail of a lizard flick under a berry bush, and reaching deep into the bush for the bigger, redder berries dangling inside. We stopped when we got hungry for something more substantial than berries, and came home with around seven baskets each. This blackberry galette was the result. The hands holding the basket of berries above arranged the berries in the galette.