Berry Pickin'

Everything is early this year because of the unusually warm spring. This means that lavender has bloomed and gone when really I should be cutting now instead of pruning back. We usually pick black raspberries during the Fourth of July weekend but this year the farms said they would be played out by then so we had to squeeze blueberry picking and black raspberry picking in the same weekend. Because of the lack of rain, the black raspberry crop was poor this year. We toiled for like two hours in the hot sun for barely enough berries to make three pies. Since black raspberries are my favorite food, this is really disappointing. It's hard to find frozen black raspberries in the store, they are expensive and not very good. I usually try to pick around 15 pounds. I was lucky to get 7 this year with my friend M and Andrew helping me pick.

I got hooked on black raspberries from my Grandma and Grandpa Perdue's house in Saint Paris. They had wild black raspberries all along a fence row by their long lane. Nothing beats black raspberries. They are smaller, juicier, sweeter, and hard to find and pick as they have more thorns, and often grow in places where the insects are vicious. I love black raspberry pie and am incredibly grateful that Graeter's make a wonderful black raspberry sauce that I can find at Kroger. Black raspberries in a bowl warmed by the sun aren't bad either. We had much better success at Berryfield farms near Centerburg and Mt Vernon. They have been irrigating their blueberries, do not use pesticides, and had very competitive prices. We got the tip from Amanda (see Made in a Treehouse in the blogroll) and had a great time. In less than two hours we picked 18 pounds of blueberries!

We actually ended up picking in a row with one of the owners. He said that starlings are the hardest birds on the blueberries, and that honeybees aren't the best pollinators for the bushes, that bumblebees and mason bees do most of the heavy lifting. He said blueberry bushes can live up to 40 years when taken care of, which is on par with grapes. Most of the blueberries went into food saver bags to be vacuum packed and frozen so in January I can make scones, muffins and who knows what else. We may make blueberry ice cream later this summary so stay tuned. I put two cups of berries in each bag.