Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 17, 2021 22:22:42 GMT -6
Huckleberries
When I was a still just a young man, we'd pick wild huckleberries, horseback, while trail riding across the Maverick Ranch. The Maverick Ranch was a sprawling cattle operation, located just Northeast of Lost City, along the dusty backroads, cow pastures, and creek beds, where twenty, or so, wagons and several teams of mules and horses could still travel relatively freely, back during the late 1970s and early '80s.
Huckleberries were always a treat to come across, and were fairly hard to locate. For those reasons and more, we treasured serendipitous finds of those little bushes, while traversing the rough, dry, terrain on one of our many trail rides between places like Hulbert, Peggs, Lost City, Money Bean Hollow, Iron Post, Swimmer, Lucky, Liberty, or Teresita.
A lot of years have passed since I've ridden horseback across the Maverick Ranch, or eaten a wild huckleberry for that matter, so I was delighted recently, to find that Jay, Oklahoma, just 30 miles from here, is the Huckleberry Capital of the World!
There has been a Huckleberry Festival held in Jay each year, between the end of June to the first weeks in July for the past 54 years ... Last year, Covid-19 wreaked havoc with our travel plans, so we were not able to attend their 53rd Annual Festival, but hopefully, this year, with any luck, we'll be there with bells on... I've been looking forward to finding a huckleberry vendor selling plants, so I might finally add a few huckleberry bushes to my permaculture landscaping scheme.
It would sure bring back some good memories to have a huckleberry plant or two out back, where I take my morning and evening walks to the garden along with my lovely wife, our little dogs, and our little deer, 'Stanley.' Sometimes, after a long day, they conk out along the way.
