It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. But I have a legit excuse. And it’s this little guy.

Everyone meet the newest love of my life. He’s almost a month now and he is keeping my husband and I very busy (and very tired). It’s a good thing he’s so dang cute 🙂

At the end of my pregnancy my husband took over nearly all of the gardening responsibilities and then when baby came my husband officially took over all of the gardening. I’m finally starting to get back on my feet and this week I started to get back to my gardening. First thing I did: harvested blackberries. In the last week I’ve harvested 8 cups of blackberries! The first thing I did was I made blackberry scones.

I stole the recipe from Cook’s Country. It can be found here: Mixed Berry Scones Recipe. It turned out delicious and I would highly recommend it. The recipe calls for almost 2 cups of frozen mixed berries; I simply used frozen blackberries. Now, even though I had fresh blackberries, I still froze them for the recipe. The reason being that if you use fresh berries they will bleed and give you not-so-pretty scones. So I picked blackberries and froze them, and then made scones with the frozen berries the very next morning.

By the by, last year I wrote a post, Everything Blackberries, where I discussed my blackberry plants and gave a brief overview on how to prune and harvest blackberries. After two seasons I feel like I have these things down and I’ve also now perfected the art of freezing excess blackberries. I’ve frozen blackberries for up to 9 months with no issues, so if done properly they really can store for quite some time. The key is to freeze them first on a baking sheet so they don’t clump together and then to store them in a bag. If you find yourself with extra blackberries on your hands and want to freeze them, here is the technique I use.

1. Wash the blackberries with cold water.
2. Line a baking sheet with paper towels. Carefully lay out the washed blackberries on the paper-towel-lined baking sheet. Loosely cover the blackberries with more paper towels and put them in the refrigerator for a few hours to dry.
3. Line a baking sheet with wax or parchment paper. Lay out the clean, dried blackberries on the baking sheet and put them in the freezer for several hours.
4. Once frozen put the blackberries in a freezer bag or (if you have the materials) a vacuum-sealed bag. Date and freeze until needed.

Until next time, happy gardening! And hopefully “next time” will be soon – we shall see how much sleep, gardening, and blogging baby lets me get done 🙂