Berry Greedy Pickers

 I can tell you that $41 worth of blueberries will just about break your arm. So we bring auxiliary containers  (plastic buckets) to dump the booty into so we can keep picking with our light little Easter baskets.

I wanted a shot of Liam walking his berries up to the garage to be counted.  But I had to stop in the middle of shooting. "Don't swing a full basket, Liam!"

"Okay!"

 

  And here goes Phoebe with hers.

 Not until I got this shot on the screen did I notice I'd captured a priceless moment in Liam's sweet life. Craack! Whump! Dump!


Classic! Look at his mouth, wide open. Ohhh! Dang!

Phoebe, of course, stopped to help him recover his fruit.

There was a little fellow at the cash register who was only too happy to ring us up. His mom had a terrible time keeping those fingers at bay. He wanted to punch all the keys at once, and he came at that little adding machine like a baby octopus. "I try! I try!" And she let him punch in our sale.

 Needless to say the Thomas the Tank Engine PJ's, worn all day long, endeared him to me forever. Not to mention his passionate desire to help his mom. I remembered Liam always punching keys on the credit card machine at the grocery store. He'd get so frustrated when nothing happened. His momma's a cash type.

 

 Too soon, it was time to turn for home. We could have picked until nightfall, but I was out of money. And truth to tell, I made a cobbler with the last of the frozen berries from June 2010 to make room for 2011 fruit in the freezer!  That's what happens when you have helpful kids (one of whom once wore his Thomas pajamas all day long, too)

and beautiful blueberries, with the greenywhite promise of more to come. Ahh, Summer. Could you just linger awhile longer, spread out your gifts through the long dull winter?

21st Century Hunter-Gatherers

 I believe I was a crazy good hunter-gatherer in another life. I love to pick things and I'm fast at it. My kids have inherited the gene, although they tend to look for the premium fruit rather than mass volumes of it. They pride themselves not on having the most berries, but the biggest and fattest.  I pick three times faster than they do, but their berries are Super Premium.

The blueberries at Rolling Ridge Berry Farm are more the size of grapes this year. 

 

And they are sooo beautiful. I love the ones with the heavy bloom, like these:

 

They remind me of the powdery sheen on a pigeon's feather. 

All around us the songs of Baltimore orioles, scarlet tanagers, robins, cedar waxwings and yellow-breasted chats rang out from the woods and blueberry rows. You won't see crop netting here, or hear cannons or nasty recordings of starling distress calls. The Winders grow enough for the birds and us.

 

View from the backmost berry row, where I like to pick and bird at the same time. It's alive with yellowthroats, white-eyed vireos, chats, robins and the like.

The habitat all around is rich and birdy to start with and then this farm sets a smorgasbird. You can imagine. Lots of parent birds bring their fledglings to the farm to fatten them up and get a break from the babies' incessant demands for food.

Phoebe and Liam noticed that the sweetest berries were most likely to have a couple pierced by the triangular pecks of birds. They know where the best ones are.

So seduced were we by the abundance and ease of picking that before we knew it we had FORTY-ONE BUCKS WORTH OF BLUEBERRIES. Yiiikes. Which would have been well over $100 worth in the grocery store, only not even a tenth as fresh and delicious. To those of you who are wondering what you do with that many blueberries, we gorge on them fresh and freeze what we can't eat. We give them to friends and family, make cobblers and throw blueberries into smoothies and yogurt and over cereal. We have a blueberry ball. I'm thankful for Rolling Ridge Berry Farm. A visit there is the perfect way to spend a summer afternoon with the kids.

Picking Blueberries

Chee. Five comments on a non-existent post. Thanks, girls, love ya, mean it. Lemme try this'n again.

Our Net has been running at an arthritic snail's pace for 48 hours. Silly me, when a window popped up on my Mac telling me I needed ten software updates, most of them for functions I never use, I hit the "Download Now" button. Feeling reckless, I guess. I should have known that was taboo. Four hours into a fruitless download, our Net crashed. I spent quite some time on the phone with someone from Direcway named Dave, doubtless in Mumbai, and the upshot was that even at $93/month that we cough up for the extra bandwidth we need for our work, there are some things you just can't try. So he told us we'd have to wait 24 hours after the download event before it would regain its composure. And I didn't even get the updates.

Something made me try to put up a post this afternoon. I'm sick as a dog, and in between lying in a fetal position, gulping ibuprofen, and putzing around the kitchen wiping counters in a desultory way, I wanted to have one little thing I could point to as my product (besides the Tuscan chicken stew I made this morning). Everything was going at about one-fifth the normal speed, but I struggled through a photo-heavy post, hit Publish, and it simply vanished, as if it had never been there. Sorry, Mary, there aren't words foul enough to make that feel better, and yes, ladies, I cried. Bill drew me a hot bath and here I am, back again, watching Autosave like a hawk. Save this post, !@#@$#%$#%!!!
There's this blueberry farm, a you-pick operation, about 12 miles farther into the back of beyond from our place. Going there with the kids on an August evening is one of my favorite things in the world. I took Phoebe there when she was toddling, and got Liam there once, and he filled his dipe with evidence of his baby picking prowess. And then the farm closed down, because, with their kids in middle and high school, the owners just didn't have the time to run it. Yeah, I know the feeling. I prayed they would keep the old bushes; they were so wonderfullly grand. As it happened, the farm was closed to picking for eight years, time enough for that diapered Liam to grow into a fine young boy, for Phoebe to head to middle school herself. Every July I'd yearn for blueberries, to no avail, so we dutifully ate the pulpy store-bought ones from Jersey and Michigan and the Carolinas, working around the squashy hairy moldy ones, wishing...
Rolling Hills wanted to open back up last spring, but the April freeze that burned every plant in Ohio squelched that. And then one fine morning my mother-in-law called with the happy news: they were back in business at Rolling Hills. Life kept us away until last night, but we finally made it out there.
The plants are just about done, but there are still some berries. Mostly, you pick them singly, rather than rolling your hand down a whole cluster like this one.

Liam took to picking like a duckie to water, proclaiming, "Blueberry picking is the best sport in the world!
Phoebe prided herself on immaculate, large, unblemished berries.
It was all so primal, being hunter-gatherers for an evening, plucking live fruit from the bushes, popping them into our mouths, listening to the plunk of berries on bucketbottom, the low murmurs of other people hidden throughout the rows.
At one point I looked up and there were two Baltimore orioles perched on the phone line overhead; another time, with my camera about 20 feet away next to a full bucket of berries, I glanced up to see a flaming male scarlet tanager right over my head, his eye shiny and inquisitive, the shot lost, but the image burned forever on my brain. Robins, towhees, kingbirds, waxwings: they were all there, as they had been since the bushes first started bearing.

Finally, it was time to weigh in.

(I am getting nervous. Blogger won't save this post. Agggghh. Shoot me now, before you lose another post.)
All told, we picked 11 pounds of berries, and it cost $18.00; a mere $1.63/pound. A bargain at any price, these sweet, plump, tangy fruits.I'm thankful for this little farm, for the buckets and bales of blueberries in the fridge. Liam got all territorial; wants to eat only those he picked himself; he doesn't realize that I keep topping off his Tupperware with ones from my bucket.
We'll be back before the season ends for good. Picking blueberries in Ohio in August is a fine, fine thing. Tomorrow, I'll show you what we saw on the drive home. Right after I go to the doctor. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Self-Diagnosing Science Chimp: Hi, Tami. I've got a kidney infection (substitute tick-borne disease, sinus infection...).

Tami: Oh, yeah? What's going on?

SDSC: Lower back pain, radiating down the legs, jumping up every ten minutes all night, burning up with fever, feel like I've been hit by a truck and then it backed over me again. Gimme some sulfa?

Tami: Scribble scribble scribble