Prince Harry and Falstaff banter about blackberry picking and blackberry eating in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part I. Alchemically, blackberries have properties of promoting wealth and protecting the eater from evil. Galway Kinnell’s poem Blackberry Eating, from which this blog’s title is taken, remembers the propensity of swollen, shining black blackberries, overripe and almost frozen on a cold morning, to fall unbidden to the speaker’s tongue. Then he curiously likens this involuntary offering for digestion to words, especially “certain peculiar words” that sometimes emerge. Now that September approaches, now that several substantial harvests have kept me in blackberries through the summer, I know that those small clusters of berries only beginning to flush red today will come full and ripe at the end of next month, and perhaps I can experience Kinnell’s comparison.

For today, however, the likeness between late September berries and unexpectedly summoned words will have to suffice as an analogy for this, a blog focused on sharing my culinary and gardening adventures. Welcome. Enjoy.