Every year from the 2nd week in July until the 1st week in August it's time to harvest blueberries .

Knowing that the window for picking blueberries is rather short, @farm-mom and I go at it like there's no tomorrow. We gather enough of these nutritional packed blue jewels to take us from one year to the next. Unlike our veggie garden which requires constant attention, #Mother #nature's garden necessitates no care whatsoever. This patch is loaded with blueberry bushes and the sheer number of berries on each bush is a sight to see.

These bushes are not on our property.

Luckily, the property where they do grow is on Robin's Uncle Louie's farm. Uncle Louie was one of a kind and he always had a special relationship with my better half. He passed away 5 years ago on my birthday, November 6th. He's the reason we bought our property 40 years ago.

The trek to this patch is not an easy one. Getting there requires a jaunt through the woods on the four-wheeler and then about a half mile walk.

The walk is not an easy one, crossing two mountain brooks and then heading uphill for most of the journey.

The first visit to the blueberry patch is filled with excitement and is always the most difficult.

This area is not visited too often, unless berries are to be gathered. The knee high grasses are undisturbed and getting around requires a great deal of effort. With each visit, the paths to the bushes get more and more defined by our traffic.

50 people could pick berries every day for 8 hours a day and the bushes would still be puking with berries.

We were not the only ones plucking the berries from the bushes, our #featheredfriends enjoyed #nature's gifts as well. Their songs added to the serenity of the moment.

We usually spend about 4 hours milking the berries from the bushes.

At the end of each session our arms feel like lead. As we make our way down the trail it's all smiles. Once we cross the stream, our bike awaits to take us back to our farm.

Once we are home it's time to clean what we have gathered.

Separating the berries from the debris that has made its way into the containers is an exercise in
determination. We find that rolling the berries down a baking sheet is the most expedient way to separate the good from the bad. This part of the operation takes a couple of hours.

The berries are then laid back on a baking sheet and frozen before being packaged. We never wash them before packaging as doing so will deteriorate the skin of the berry. Being that these berries are not cultivated and are wild, they are not sprayed with toxins like your commercial berries.

After removing them from the freezer they are now as hard as marbles. Vacuum sealing the berries will keep them good for a year.

Here's this year's bounty, 35 pounds of berries.

The time spent getting them to the freezer took about 35 hours for the two of us.
Here is a log that we have kept since 2017. This was not the best year we've ever had, that would have been in 2020 when we picked and processed 56 pounds, but it's more than last year.

Blueberries can contain a lot of pesticides.

Well, this is not the issue if you are eating the blueberries which are organic and straight from harm. But if you are eating from different sources, there are chances of consuming a lot of pesticides. Blueberries are also part of the dirty dozen, this means they are grown commercially using the harmful chemicals on them.
https://thenextfind.com/pros-cons-of-blueberry/