Last Sunday I went blueberry picking first thing in the morning before the heat of the day set in. I have a row of blueberry bushes that my grandfather planted back in the nineteen seventies that are still producing gallons of blueberries each year. A couple of years ago Vicki and I put bird netting over the berry bushes to help keep the birds off of the ripening fruit, but as I started picking, I noticed a Robin that had figured out how to get under the netting to rob me of my delicious berries. Besides earthworms, Robins love blueberries, and they can clean off a bush in a matter of hours if it is not protected. 

Luckily it only seemed to be one Robin that was robbin’ me. So off I went picking my berries, looking like Juan Valdez picking coffee beans. I had a small bucket hanging from a lanyard around my neck so that both hands were free for picking. I had a five gallon bucket next to me so that I could dump my picking bucket before it got too heavy. Picking blueberries is very time consuming as you have to be careful not to knock off the unripened fruit while picking the ripe berries. If you think about harvesting grapes, you cut the whole bunch off the vine at the same time, but with blueberries it is one at a time. But it is worth it, as there is nothing better than a fresh blueberry. I had quite a few while picking, and me picking blueberries is kind of like a dog concentrating on algebra! Squirrel. 

I would start on one branch, then see a huge clump on another branch and move over there and so forth. I lack proper training on blueberry picking etiquette. It is a bad habit that I still have from back in the day when I went berry picking with my grandparents. We used to pick wild blueberries under the Marcy South power lines, and there were so many bushes that I would go from bush to bush to bush, never completing a single bush at a time but picking off three or four bushes at once. Of course, this uses up much more energy, but my grandparents didn’t mind because it just meant I would get tired out faster and go sit in the car. They didn’t expect much help from an eight year old anyway, but I was good at getting the lower berries so they didn’t have to bend down. Now that I’m older and have an eight year old granddaughter of my own, I can appreciate that sentiment. Luckily the blueberry bushes I have are all highbush blueberries and are six to eight feet tall. The lowest berries are at least four feet off the ground. I’m not sure what varieties they are because there was not much availability back in the seventies compared to the blueberries we sell today. 

Some of the oldest commercial varieties are Coville, Jersey, Elizabeth and Bluecrop, so I would venture that they are a few of each. I didn’t start working in the garden center at Liberty Agway until nineteen eighty-three and at that time we only had a couple more varieties available. These days there are a dozen or so varieties that we get in every spring, eight are the basics and then we will get some oddball varieties when available. Two years ago we had a variety called pink lemonade which actually has pink berries with a lemony blueberry taste. I planted one and this year should have a good harvest off of it, but they are not quite ripe yet. The most recent popular blueberry is sweetheart, which has a large sweet berry and only grows to six feet tall, so you won’t have to stretch to get the fruit on the top. We have had them for the last few years and they have sold out every spring. 

After about three hours of picking, the sun was creeping over the trees and I knew my time was coming to a close as the temperature would be climbing into the eighties. So I wrapped things up for now, but I’ll have to go back in a week or so to get all the unripened berries that just needed a little more time. I still ended up with a few gallons of berries now and probably a few gallons more next week, depending on how hungry that Robin is.