I have picked a lot of blackberries.

When we moved into our house, the garden was overgrown with a variety of things, including some extravagant bramble growth. We removed most of the other plants, but left the incipient blackberries until later in the year, once we’d had the chance to harvest them.

It is now that time. I don’t think it counts as foraging when it’s from your own garden, but it’s something close to it. I’ve been out collecting them on four days this week, gathering half a kilo each time. The first batch went into a large blackberry and apple crumble, but the rest I’ve frozen for later, so we currently have 1.5kg of blackberries in the freezer and plenty more still to come.

What does one do with several kilos of blackberries, though?

My grandmother used to make a very nice bramble jelly, so I might have a go at that. I might try turning some into blackberry liqueur. I’ve seen recipes for blackberry wine, but that seems like a lot of time and effort.

Once again, we’ve had prodigious amounts of rain this week. I really want to see what the rainfall statistics end up being for July and August 2021. I’m sure it’s an order of magnitude more than would usually be expected, but perhaps it’s not at all unusual and it’s just my perception.

I put together a better set of drum samples for my Novation Circuit using the free Reverb Drum Machines collection. The biggest problem I had, after deciding which samples to use, was the fact that they all had wildly differing volume levels, but the normalize-audio tool fixed that in seconds.

I’m sure it could be done with GUI tools – I believe that Audacity has batch processing – but I don’t think I could have done it anywhere near as quickly.

On the recommendation of a few people, we watched We Are Lady Parts. It’s fun, raucous, and short. Like a good punk album.