Vancouver Island is a great place to live and visit, especially in summer when the days are long and the sun is shining. We’re highlighting some of our favourite summertime activities — things we think everyone should try to fit in before fall comes around again.
Jim McMillan had such fond childhood memories of picking blackberries with his grandfather along railway tracks back in Scotland that he knew he had to create the same sweet memories for his own children — and now his grandchildren.
“That memory stuck with me,” said McMillan, 81, picking blackberries with his family at a now-defunct signal crossing along the overgrown E&N railway tracks in Esquimalt. “That’s what I remember my grandfather for, taking me along those railway lines.”
“This is the best place I’ve ever known in British Columbia and this year is a crop like you wouldn’t believe,” McMillan said. “My wife and I picked three pounds in 25 minutes just down by the other side of the railway.”
Blackberry picking season is typically late July to mid September, but with 2023’s consistently hot dry summer, amateur berry pickers are forecasting the season might conclude at the end of this month.
McMillan said as a boy growing up just outside of Glasgow in the early 1950s there weren’t “a lot of sweet things” in the household, so the production of blackberry jelly was a welcome event for all.
“That’s how I got infected by the bug,” he said.
McMillan was picking blackberries with his wife Beverly Smith, his adult children Chris McMillan and Sue Wheatley, and Wheatley’s husband Ian and daughter Gemma. Also part of the blackberry picking party was Wheatley’s niece Holly McMillan, and Smith’s great niece and nephew, Hayven and Dawson Johnson.
“Hopefully when I go — in a 100 years time — they’ll continue to do the same with their kids,” McMillan said.
Blackberry picking is a summer staple for many families who turn the bulbous berries into jams, preserves, pies and even wine — or just eat them as is.
Thorny blackberry canes grow wild all over the Island. The non-native Himalyan blackberry (scientific name Rubus armeniacus), is the main invasive variety in the Pacific Northwest, according to the non-profit Invasive Species Council of B.C. It grows up to five metres tall with vines as long as 12 metres.
There’s also the native Pacific trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus). According to the province, there are many hybrids and blackberry varieties for planting — including thornless — varying in berry size, flavour, productivity, hardiness and susceptibility to disease.
Carmen Hutchinson, 46, was picking blackberries with 10-year-old son Brandon near Victoria General Hospital this week.
Hutchinson said as a child she’d be paid $5 or $10 to pick blackberries. It kept her and her friends out most of the day as they picked “one for the bucket, one for our mouth.”
“VGH is our secret spot — every year we get about 10 litres every time we go out,” she said.
Now a single mother, Hutchinson said she’s passed the love of berry picking — as well as lessons in food security — onto her son.
Armed with four-litre buckets, the pair pick blackberries in late summer, freezing most of their haul to put on ice cream, reduce into a compote for French toast, or grind into smoothies. “Instead of sugar-filled Slurpees in summer we have something much healthier.”
Hutchinson said she sees small clamshells of blackberries and strawberries in the store for $4.99 or more and teaches her son to benefit from the cost savings, self-satisfaction and self-reliance in picking or growing his own.
Brandon has planted enough strawberries that they have produced fruit all summer, she said. When lettuce and other vegetable prices went up during the pandemic, Hutchinson said, they had their own summer salad ingredients — lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and onions — growing in their balcony garden.
Hutchinson recommends berry pickers go in the early morning before the sun gets too hot and before the bees and wasps are too busy.
She and her son like using grabbers to pull down the thorny vines to better access the berries. She’s seen others use step ladders and even two-by-fours to gain deeper access to the bushes.
McMillan recommends a pair of padded gloves and garden clippers or pruners to cut away at brush as the keys to efficiently filling your bucket.
But although the thorny bramble is quite sharp and quick to draw blood, he doesn’t wear special clothing for the job. “I’m Scottish, I’m thorny to begin with,” he joked.
When picking berries, look for fully ripe ones that are a deep purple and plump and intact. McMillan recommends bushes in partly shaded areas — where there’s full sun the blackberries can dry out sooner. And don’t go for the lowest berries if it’s a popular place for dogs to relieve themselves, he said.
McMillan said he recently pulled off the road when he saw a great crop of blackberries on the border of a private property on Salt Spring.
While he was picking, a car pulled up and the driver warned that the owner of the house charges $5 a pound for the berries picked.
Shocked, McMillan momentarily stopped in his tracks looking at the potential cost of his haul, only to see the driver smile and then pull into the driveway.
“He was pulling my leg; I enjoyed that.”
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