 
It’s looking to be a great summer for blackberries, but it’s also looking like a great year for heat. So any berry picking will be before breakfast and will result in fresh fruit on that day’s cereal. I was sorry I waited a few days too long to take pictures, since by the time I got around to it, petals were dropping and the fruits were already starting to swell.
Even this close to a bumper crop, if the heat continues this hot this early and we stop getting the regular rains we’ve been blessed with, the best we’ll hope for is hard little knots of bitter fruit.
It is all quite out of our hands until we have those telltale purple stains on our hands and around our mouths.
Be happy for the rain and enjoy the berries. Our crop of small mostly tart dewberries are a distant memory from a month or more ago.
What with heat and no rain we are already 7″+ behind for the year and heat indexes have been above 105 all week.
The winds off the Gulf are beginning to drop fast moving rain showers in narrow bands running inland. We finally had a small shower on Thursday, our first in over a month.
Our strawberries are just winding down as are the mulberries. Blackberries and dewberries, each of which I’ve had at previous homes, we don’t have! Good berrying.