Blueberry Picking

Our blueberry bushes are loaded with berries that are ripening everyday.  The branches are loaded down and are bent over with the weight.  Blueberries don't ripen all at the same time, so each day we go out with a bowl and encircle our 9 bushes and pick off the ripest ones.  They are nice sized berries this year, and I think that is due to timely rains that we got after the berries were set.

Blueberry branches loaded down

It is sort of like a race.  Not only do we love blueberries, but the birds do, too!  I can see remnants of berries that are eaten (except for the skins) lying under the bushes.  I have some netting, so next year I'm considering putting netting around the bushes to protect our berries from the birds.  When picking blueberries, you really have to look closely, because the berries are hidden all throughout the bushes.

Plump, delicious berries

Each day we come back inside with a nice bowl of blueberries.  They are healthy and delicious and to be totally truthful, I could eat the whole bowl by myself.  We're eating them up, but we're also going to freeze some like we did the dewberries so that we can enjoy them later.  As our bushes get bigger or as we add more bushes to our little orchard, we'll have enough to make jelly.

Fresh-picked blueberries on the kitchen windowsill

Sunday morning seemed like a perfect morning for some homemade blueberry muffins made with some blueberries from the Farm.  There's four of us at home now, so that meant that we each were allotted 3 muffins.  Benjamin put some local honey on his muffin.  Since they were fresh out of the oven and still steaming, I considered slathering some real butter on top of mine and letting the butter melt into all the nooks and crannies of the muffin, but I wolfed them down plain, enjoying the taste of the succulent berries.

Hot Blueberry Muffins

Sorry for the blurry picture, but you can still make out the nice blueberries in the muffin.

This lonely muffin actually survived breakfast without being eaten...

But it was quickly dispatched within minutes after we arrived home from church.