a "Berry" fun treat

We have Raspberries and Blackberries in our backyard. We LOVE them. I love the raspberries so much that I've given them a pretty big area that I've let them completely take over. We've been getting berries over the last few months but I was REALLY bummed when I saw that there were TONS of grasshoppers and other critters eating holes in the leaves and eating a ton of the berries! I never got around to spraying them since I can hardly keep up with all of the weeding and pruning in this beautifully enormous backyard of ours! :) With all of the critters "helping" us eat the berries there haven't been too many left to pick which is why I was SHOCKED to go out on Monday and find the branches weighed down with beautiful ripe berries! I got all the kids out there and we all picked berries for about 20 minutes and filled our strainer!

It is a lot of fun to have berries in our backyard. I've wanted to plant a garden with tomatoes and peppers and squash and other yummy things but I just don't know if I could keep up with it and all of the other yard work too. I have a hard enough time keeping the kids on task cleaning up inside that adding a gardening task on might be a little much! Someday things will slow down and we'll grow a garden, but in the meantime, we'll enjoy our berries... and we'll even share with the grasshoppers!