Well, at least June is for berry picking in Arkansas! We were able to do a bunch of picking of blueberries, blackberries, and peaches following the completion of the 2022 summer dig (see last Bragg Family South blog post on that...). Since I had the new Juneteenth federal holiday off, I took Beth and Stephen to a pick-your-own place about an hour from where we live. Their plants were just loaded with fresh goodies, such as the blueberries shown above...and I think I picked my biggest individual blueberry ever:
This picture isn't photoshopped--that is really how big it was! We also picked a bunch of large blackberries that this fruit farm offered:
I'm not sure what point Beth was making in the picture above--perhaps she was just observing how abundant and large the blackberries were, and how easy it was to fill our buckets:
It took us only a few minutes to get pounds of these berries...and we were equally successful in scoring a bunch of nicely ripe peaches from the same farm:
Indeed, as we've often found, it was so easy to pick so much fruit, that we ended up with far more than we could consume as a family during the next couple of days! We ate a bunch fresh, froze some, turned many of the peaches into a wonderful peach sorbet (thanks to Beth), made others into cobblers...some of which we froze...and I still had a bunch of blackberries that I carried up to my next work adventure.
This "adventure" is something I've helped with most of the years I've been with the Forest Service--a silviculture (forest management) training course for those that do that work with my agency on the national forests. This year, circumstances meant that we split this two-week long training into two one-week sessions, and this session started at the top of Rich Mountain in western Arkansas. Here is a picture of sunset along a trail on this mountain:
For the past several sessions of this training course, we have come to the lodge at Queen Wilhelmina State Park (https://www.arkansasstateparks.com/parks/queen-wilhelmina-state-park) on the top of Rich Mountain for its convenient access to the nearby Ouachita National Forest, the beautiful views, and its excellent lodging and conference room facility:
Being near this part of the Ouachita National Forest also put us close to some excellent shortleaf pine restoration projects that my research work unit has been involved with since the early 1990s. Below is the picture of one such stand with many of the training course participants in the stand of pine:
After a couple days in this part of the state, we then drove to closer to north-central Arkansas for a couple more days, this time on the Ozark National Forest (but still looking primarily at shortleaf pine-dominated forests).
After this great training course, I continued working at my office, but found time on another really nice weather day (only in the low 80s, vs. the 100+ degrees it is today!) to take the morning off to meet up with some archeologists at the Taylor House (an antebellum plantation home in eastern Drew County, where we live). This house has been acquired and restored by the University of Arkansas-Monticello into a version of what it looked like in the late 1800s:
After a brief visit at the Taylor House, we drove to a nearby friends house to pick blueberries from some of their own plants:
Leon Chapman (left) hosted us; our party also included Kenny, Jessica Cogburn (center; she was the former UAM Assistant Station Archeologist and our next-door neighbor for a number of years), several of Jessica's colleagues at the Department of Arkansas Heritage (for whom she currently works), and Matthew Rooney (current UAM Station Archeologist). We have been close with Jessica and her family for years, so we always look forward to her visits!
This was a pretty brief blog post, because I'm planning to soon start working on one for the big trip to the western US we just returned from...
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