On a lovely, windy Saturday morning right at the end of orientation week, a crew of adventurous and freshly oriented students from Old Dorm Block embarked on a quest that turned out to be quite, well, fruitful.
Their quest took them far from their beautiful old brick home at the heart of Reed’s campus all the way to Sauvie Island, an idyllic expanse of every type of U-Pick farm imaginable: apples, flowers, pumpkins, christmas trees, and, of course, berries. Now, the date of this quest happened to be right smack in the middle of Blackberry Season. And oh, what a season it was. After arriving safely at Sauvie Island Farms thanks to the expertise of a capable van driver–(thanks Aaron!)–our band of heroes was bowled over by the bounty of bushes bursting with ripe blackberries awaiting them. The sheer number of blackberries present at every turn may have overwhelmed some less-seasoned adventurers, but not our brave ODB residents. In less than an hour of furious picking (and maybe little bit of snacking), these berry bosses had three overflowing boxes of the antioxidant-packed and delicious little fruits.
Three boxes! When taken in comparison to the thousands of blackberries left still ripening on the bushes at Sauvie Island Farms, three boxes may not have seemed like much. But when our heroes lugged these three boxes (thirty pounds!) of blackberries home to discover that they filled an entire freezer compartment and then some, they wondered:
“Have we picked off more than we can chew?”
Stay tuned for part two to see the ingenious way our brave protagonists made use of thirty pounds of frozen blackberries!
