After posting up the recipe for Blackberry Dumplings, I went back to the berry patch to pick more wild berries. Returning to the same patch, I was determined to pick only the blackest, plumpest, ripest berries. At the first picking, I had been so excited to find ripe berries, that I picked berries a little prematurely. However, since that first picking, we’ve had hard rains, coupled with days of sunshine in between, and now the berries have had time to fully ripen. While picking this morning I learned that if my shadow falls across the berries, they appear darker than they really are. So I made a conscious effort not to block the sun and to pick all of them in the glaring sunlight.