The Season in Full Force

The term 'blueberry season' is no longer a mythical future event, with unknown possibilities. It's here, and we're neck deep.
The day starts out with pickers arriving around 8:15-8:30, and with Katie leading the charge, they begin harvesting all those tasty tasty berries. The season started off with bringing in an average of 300lbs or so, slowly ramping up to 500lb last week, and our whopping total for today was a back-breaking 1500lbs! We are fast approaching the peak for 'the season' and it is fast and furious. Katie is doing a wonderful job of keeping track of pickers, Marc is getting better and faster at sorting (or 'grading' in the blueberry world) and their various helpers make the day go so much faster and smoother. Many thanks to Cliff and Jack who help out regularly at the hut, not to mention Bryan, Lynn and Beth, who don't need to help, but are ready and willing to do so anyways!!
Here are some shots from around the farm. Some of them are several weeks old, mostly because of how busy we've been.

This was taken just as the berries were starting to turn blue!

Marc walking through the fields, checking for ripe berries. Still waiting at this point.

A shot down one of the rows, still probably a week or so away from picking in this picture.

Taken last week, of a branch with various stages of ripeness.

Come on berries, save some room for the leaves!

It doesn't seem possible that this branch could hold this many berries.

3 nice juicy berries. These are the Patriot variety.

Part of our garage table layout for sales.

Jam and soap nuts! Not together.

Pints!

The 3lbs are good sellers. Probably because most people realize that the pint size wouldn't make it to the end of the road...

Our berries, their berries. It just doesn't seem fair, does it?

The end of the day, depending on sales that day, can go either way. If sales were good, then we have fewer berries to freeze. Sometimes, like today, sales were really good, but we still had a lot to freeze! The nights tend to be later than some of us would hope, but we want to ensure our customers are only getting fresh blueberries, so anything that wasn't sold that day, is frozen that night. This way too, we have something to sell year round. In order to freeze them, we need to hand sort through all the berries and take off the stems, or leftover tree remnants, and weigh them into 5lb bags. When you have 150lbs to sort through, this can take a while! Good thing many hands make light work. :)