Blueberry Harvesting Tips + Easy Berry Dessert

Here’s 6 quarts of the 22 I picked last week!

It’s blueberry time at the Little Farm! 

My days are filled with berry picking, putting them up for the freezer…and trying to keep the rest of the food garden watered and weeded! 

And of course, baking yummy blueberry desserts with all this bounty.

At our place, with a wide variety of shrubs, the blueberry harvest goes from mid-July until the end of August. 

Depending on the weather, the harvest can extend into early September. It’s a rewarding time, for sure…

But each summer, as our shrubs get larger, and produce bigger harvests, blueberry season gets a bit more overwhelming!

A couple of days ago, I picked a several quarts, and got them rinsed and drying on the counter for freezing. At the same time, I decided to bake my go-to blueberry recipe, Blueberry Buckle!

Chaotic kitchen on our homestead!

Raising Blueberries

Given how busy things can get, with each season, I try to improve my harvesting/picking strategies. 

Keep in mind that the berries on each different variety of shrub ripen at different times. Some have an early harvest, some mid-season, and some don’t ripen much until mid-August. And remember: just because a berry is blue, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sweet! 

I’ve gotten into a habit of closely observing my shrubs for ripening timeframes, and taste-testing too. A dark purple berry won’t be quite ripe; you want to see a deep blue before you pick. 

Some berries aren’t ripe until the entire berry cluster has turned that deep blue. But other varieties, like the large-berry “Chandler” will have a few very ripe berries, while the rest of the cluter is still white or pink.

For tips for finding the sweeter berries…

Basic picking technique is to curl your hand beneath a berry cluster, and sort of “tickle” the berries. The ripe ones will fall into your hand.

When it's early in the season, you're probably trying to select the ripe berries when there are still so many white ones on the shrubs. Here's what you do: just look for the clusters of berries where all but one or two berries are blue. Select the largest berries in the cluster, and you'll be sure to end up with more sweet ones!

Baking with Blueberries

The good news is, if you’ve inadvertently picked a lot of not-quite-sweet fruit, there’s always putting them into a dessert! Our go-to easy summer dessert is Blueberry Buckle—a kind of coffee-cake type recipe, adapted from the original recipe for huckleberries. This link includes the complete method. 

You can make it from basic baking ingredients you’ll probably have in your pantry, so there’s no extra trip to the store!

I’m always improving on the recipe, and last season, I got inspired by my “Downton Abbey” cookbook. I adapted their recipe for “Fairy Cakes” and ended up with a slightly richer Buckle. 

If you’d like to compare with the original, here’s a screenshot of the Buckle “cake” portion.

The struesel topping is super basic, just 1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, and a generous sprinkling of cinnamon. 

I’ve got several versions of the Buckle here on this blog… If you’d like to see them all, there’s a handy search bar on the top left corner!

Here are pics of the one I made this past weekend… I did get greedy with too many berries on the top. The middle was still goey after 1 hour of baking, so it took extra time. Next time I’ll stick with 2 cups of berries, like the recipe says!

Here’s the buckle before baking, topped with berries (too many, I learned!)

Here it is with the struesel/crumb topping before baking

And after baking! You’ll see it’s a little brown, from the extra baking time

For more on growing blueberries homestead-style, it’s all in my free ebook, Little Farm in the Garden… It’s available at all ebook retailers, and the #1 book in Amazon’s Pacific Northwest Gardening category! 

You’ll find additional free ebooks at SusanColleenBrowne.com…just click “Free to Read” for an Irish romance, a Halloween book for kids, and more!

Harvest-time and Happy Michaelmas!

Michaelmas-time harvest!

After feasting on your garden’s bounty, watching the growing season wind down is a bit bittersweet, isn’t it?

Yesterday evening, it was down in the 40s at our place and the fourth day of rain. Still, in between showers, I was able to get a nice little picking of three quarts of blueberries!

I also scored a few zucchinis and a handful of tomatoes that hadn’t split from the cold and wet weather.

I’ve never had my Chandler blueberry shrubs still bearing at the end of September, and I expected them to be really sour. What a treat, then, to find them as sweet as the ones I picked three weeks ago.

The tomatoes still had some nice flavor, which was also a nice surprise! 

Today, September 29, is Michaelmas, the traditional feast day celebrating the harvest. As a food gardener, I think about how, back in the day, the harvests were precious—the food had to last for a whole year. 

Here at our place, we’ve got garlic and onions stored to last through the winter; enough potatoes for the next couple of months, and a fridge full of apples. Our second crop of carrots, as well as our parsnips, will be ready for harvesting within a couple of weeks. 

So today, recognizing this olden-times tradition seems like a wonderful way to recognize the fruits of your food-raising labor. 

Today we’ve got a sunny, warmish day, and garden chores are waiting for me! Instead of writing something new, I’m sharing (reposting) our Michaelmas celebration from two years ago…

Michaelmas, or the Feast Day of St. Michael and All the Angels, is an old-timey holiday that was celebrated September 29. 

In the British Isles, Michaelmas traditionally marked the day the grain harvest was pretty much done. People would celebrate with a feast of roast goose and all the trimmings--and the landlords would be pretty happy too because harvest time meant farmers could pay the rent.

Michaelmas also gets a mention in many of the historical BBC series John and I enjoy, created from classic English novels like Jane Austen's or Elizabeth Gaskin's. Those English-country worlds are very idealized, sure, but we all need a wee farm fantasy once in a while!

John and I like to recognize Michaelmas as an early start to the autumn holidays. We set out our set of fall figurines that remind me of an old-fashioned, New England apple farm, and they help brighten the house after the fall rains arrive and darkness comes earlier and earlier. 

We also like to celebrate our own little harvest time. The blueberries are done--we each had our last bowlful of fresh ones this morning--but we're still picking cukes, tomatoes, and zucchini. The fridge is brimming with apples, potatoes and carrots; garlic and onions crowd the pantry.

We definitely won't have roast goose though--a few years back, we bought a crazy-expensive, locally-raised, pastured goose, and I roasted it like turkey. And had to wonder, did I do it wrong? It was tough and gamey- tasting, and given the $40 we spent, we decided never again. 

So I'm preparing beef stew, full of our own vegetables, inspired by a super simple recipe I found in the October issue of Country Living magazine: Braised Beef with Tomatoes and Onions. I'll also make a cucumber salad with the gigantic cuke I found a couple of days ago. And with all the apples around, I think an apple dessert needs to happen. 

After all, with Halloween just around the corner and Thanksgiving not far away, fall is a glorious time!

Back to 2023… Tonight, the harvest moon—that is, the first full moon after the autumn equinox—is a “super moon” so it appears much larger than usual. I hope you’ll take time to gaze at the night sky and enjoy the sight!