Mar 092025

Thoughts on Community Engagement Thanks to Picking Berries

Thoughts on Community Engagement Thanks to Picking Berries

Working in the yard, much like walking or riding my bike, frees my brain to run wherever it likes. Last July it brought me to a list of insights into the ways that community engagement is a lot like growing and harvesting berries. I started off with a few of these and each time I picked berries again more of the thoughts ripened enough for me to pick them.

If you practice engagement as part of your work these should resonate for you as a “gardener” hoping to harvest a sweet crop of ideas and input. If you participate in civic opportunities, you might think about what it’s like to be the berry or the cane.

  • You have to prepare the ground so the plant can flourish long before it bears fruit.
  • You have to be patient—you can’t rush a plant much. Even if you do, perhaps with fertilizers, it still has to unfold its processes its own way.
  • Picking a berry before it’s ripe just yields something that’s hard to swallow and leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
  • Berries ripen at varying rates, not all at once and not on any schedule, especially not on yours if you’re the one doing the watching.
  • A berry picked a bit early still has flavor, but not as much as it would have if you had trusted the ripening process.
  • When you first look at the bush you’ll see the berries out in plain sight. Many more hide from view. You have to move the canes—gently, or they’ll break—to see more.
  • You may think you’ve found all the berries but if you start your looking in a different place you’ll find more.
  • This is even more true if you position yourself below your usual vantage point and look up. Many berries are hidden from a top-down view.
  • There may be thorns. If you move with haste or impatience you’ll snag on these. If you move with awareness of how the plant grows and with care, you can get to the berries without harm to yourself or the plant.
  • An overripe berry may no longer appear perfect but it still has a lot of flavor to add.
  • I grow golden raspberries and red ones together in the same bed. A ripe golden raspberry may masquerade as a red raspberry that’s at a different, earlier stage of ripeness and vice versa. You have to be able to recognize what you’re looking at, which requires being familiar with the plants and their growing habits.
  • The golden ones ripen earlier but they’re not as flavorful. As novelist Wallace Henry Thurman, an early figure of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote, “the darker the berry the sweeter the juice”.
  • If you live with the bushes and pick berries often you’ll know where to look.
  • Sometimes when you go back to a patch you thought you knew that you picked just yesterday, you find ripe or nearly ripe berries you didn’t even know were there. Looking again and looking harder often pays off.
  • Very ripe berries are fragile and need to be handled with care. They’ve been left a bit too long without being recognized for what they are.
  • Returning to the same place is rewarded with more berries.
  • Sometimes you don’t spot a berry until it’s far past its edible stage. It’s going to drop to the soil and nourish the plant that will then produce more berries in the future.
  • If you tromp around breaking the canes the berries grow on, you’ll pay for it with fewer berries in the future.
  • Your town can choose to encourage more growth by sponsoring places for people to show up and help make it happen.

Do any of these ring true for you in how community engagement plays out? Does anything in the berry metaphor shift your thinking about how you might approach working in a community?

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