Indiana Blueberry Picking

Today's plan was to get up early and head to the organic blueberry farm to pick berries. I found the place last year while trying to channel my inner Connie find educational activities for my children via the Internet. When I brought up the idea of blueberry picking my sister-in-law was not a fan.

Susan: "What? Blueberry picking? We're not going blueberry picking. It's too hot and there will be bugs. No! No! The kids don't want to do that."

Later that afternoon she brought this up with her neighbor who enthusiastically told her about how wonderful it was for the children and how she was taking her visiting relatives the following week. Begrudgingly, Susan gave in but when we arrived at the blueberry farm it was not open for business until the following week when we would be back in Florida. Susan and Gabby did return later and had the whole experience without us.

So this year Susan was determined that I would have my blueberry picking outing. We didn't quite get up early enough, but it didn't matter. A small cold front had come in during the night and the weather was a sunny and breezy 65 degrees when we headed toward the farm. We drove with the windows open so that we Floridians could stick our heads out and shout, "We LOVE this weather!"

It was quite crowded at the farm and we stood in line to sign up for picking. We decided ten pounds of blueberries would be our goal, we received our buckets, and then stood in another line to wait for the wagon that would take us to our bushes. I told everyone to pretend we were migrant workers heading out for our daily job. I'm afraid I got a tad teary-eyed just from knowing I was getting this experience. That caused Darcy to feel so happy that everyone else had conceded to share the adventure and she kept hugging me and offering to take my picture.

We boarded the tram, which was actually a tractor pulling several trailers with seats, and the driver drove us out into the fields. We hopped off and were directed by a woman with a long stick to our assigned bushes. She gave us 4 bushes to pick and left us to complete our work. We did so in record time. There were five of us working. Madison and I took the tops and the two younger girls took the lower branches. Susan was in the middle. We worked one side and then crawled through to the other side. Occasionally we snuck over into someone else's bush and picked a few or turned around and picked some off a bush behind us.

The day had started off sunny but turned cloudy, and then turned sunny again as we got into the fields. It was a tad warm for the Hoosier girls, but for us Floridians, it was beyond pleasant. It took us about thirty minutes to pick clean our bushes and our bucket wasn't really that full. Since the woman with the stick was nowhere to be found we headed back out to the end of our row to wait for the tram. 

Our bucket yielded six and a half pounds of blueberries and cost us $9.69. We tied off our little haul in a plastic bag, washed up, and headed back to the house. On tap for tonight is my famous Blueberry Crumble for dessert.