Top Tips for Blackberry Picking

Take a container and search out brambles near you - try Bashfordsland Wood in Carrickfergus or Diamond Jubilee Wood or Beach Road Nature Reserve in Whitehead.

Try to pick blackberries that are away from the roadside (traffic fumes can impair the fruit) and avoid picking fruit from lower branches as they may have been visited by animails!

Blackberries don't keep for long so either eat them within 24 hours of picking or freeze them. If you are freezing them, lay them in a single layer on a baking tray in the freezer and then once frozen, transfer to a freezer bag

Remember to pick your blackberries by Michaelmas Day (29th September), by legend - the day the Devil spits on them, making them inedible.

Blackberry Recipes at the BBC

Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.