Making use of invasive blackberries

This year I've made good use of the himalayan blackberries.  I feel like they're a very abundant underutilized resource in some regions.  

I've picked 65lb this season not counting the ones that don't get in the bucket, from probably ~9 cumulative hours picking.  I keep my belt-bucket in the car so on my way home from wherever if I see a good patch I can stop and get some.  There are also patches around here I can walk to.  I might not pick right by a highway but along the back roads I feel like they're still less polluted than conventional food - and also a lot of food we eat is grown near roads already.  There's also the back side of the roadside patches.  I mostly pick at night by headlamp when it's cool and the mosquitoes are mostly asleep.

Flavor can vary dramatically - I find the best are those with moderate water and a lot of sun.  Too much water and they are less flavorful, too little water and they're too small to be worth picking.  That said, even the shaded berries by the river here are still worth picking even if they have less flavor.  

The easiest way for me to preserve them is drying.  I dry whole berries and also mash them into a "leather" though I let it get dry enough to be crunchy.  Freezing would be nice too.  I would recommend mashing the berries and then freezing as one homogenous blob rather than freezing individual berries.  Canning jam is a bit more involved.  And since I'm picking some every few days, and they go bad really fast, I'm not going to can every few days, so it's easy to just throw each batch into the dehydrator.

Tips for picking:

- make a belt-bucket setup so you have two hands free and the bucket hanging in front of you at your waist
- you can press into the blackberry thicket with the bucket in front of you without getting too tangled, to reach deeper in
- bring a hooked stick or tool, for moving canes around and pulling toward you the ones that are just a bit too far.
- if there's a big patch and the best berries are in the middle, try trampling in there to get them, move carefully and you can do it without getting too tangled.  It's important to lift the foot up and then put it down on top of the canes to flatten them, rather than just walking straight in.
- send your tallest person to pick
- wear old clothes that are ok to get a bit more tattered
- ditto for shoes - old shoes that don't matter, or sandals
- skin heals itself while clothes don't
- it's easier to avoid getting tangled in bare skin because I feel the thorns before they get too stuck in - so I actually like to go in shorts and t-shirt or even no shirt if there's no mosquitoes
- the hands will get a bit torn up, embrace it, they heal quickly
- promptly extract any bits of thorn that get embedded - I only got one this season
- wear full plate armor if you have it (or maybe a smooth hard hat for the really tall patches)
- have water handy to rinse the hands when it's time to go

I also pick a lot of blackberries every summer. My main storage method is freezing.

But I'm curious, how do you make manzanita sugar? And would Hairy Manzanita (the main species in my food forest) be a good species to make it from?

M.K. Dorje Sr. wrote:But I'm curious, how do you make manzanita sugar? And would Hairy Manzanita (the main species in my food forest) be a good species to make it from?

Manzanita deserves it's own thread so I just made one:  https://permies.com/t/357565/berry/Making-manzanita-berries

A quick google shows hairy manzanita having similar looking berries to the ones around here so I'd assume it's similarly good.

I love invasive blackberry.

Unfortunately we moved and the one I planted here feed the birds.

We too, make use of Himalayan Blackberries as much as we can.

Two points I'd add:
1. I don't go picking without a pair of secateurs in my back pocket - nothing better than cutting your way out when accidents happen.
2. I use a berry picking bucket with a strap across my body, and normally, I put 500ml containers inside the bucket so I can put filled containers in the shade and not have an accident that spills 2 liters of berries!

I have been told that they are one of the most nutritious foods in our area - lots of micronutrients and anti-cancer chemicals. I will mix them in with apples in apple crumble, make sauces and jams, or mix them with yogurt. If they weren't so obnoxious to pick, I'd feed more of them to my chickens and ducks!

Recently I made custard and then to serve it, I put a generous dollop of very thick blackberry sauce on top and it made a wonderful "desert" that had a lot of redeeming characteristics - home grown eggs, organic whole milk, and very little sugar. I did not add any sugar to the Blackberry Sauce.

That's awesome! My goal was 5gals of blackberry this year. I personally freeze mine more than dry, and I always make a couple quarts of lacto fermented blackberries in a 2% brine. So good on pancakes in the dead of winter. This year I'm adding some to our cider, too. It's a shame that they don't get picked more!