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!

Food Gardening To-Dos for the 1st day of Summer

Loads of baby apples…but most will have to go!

When you’re raising food, May can feel like a busy time: weeding, sowing, weed-whacking…But June, whew! Your food garden is at warp speed!

Here in the Foothills, there was snow last week in our neighborhood, covering the highest peak we see from our front yard. 

At our place, it was 48 degrees in the daytime and pouring rain. Night temps were even colder.

Naturally, the weeds were thriving. So more weeding chores, but it was too rainy to get out and get to work.

Now, in these “Junuary” spells (as cold June weather is called around here), cool weather crops will generally do okay. But when it comes to warm weather crops…well, any seed I set in the ground would have simply disappeared. 

Then finally, this week the weather got the memo that it’s summer! In this brief window of 80 degree daytime highs, I’ve been pulling off winter mulch and prepping beds. I’m just winding up planting less hardy crops while the soil is warm: tomato starts, as well as cucumbers, zucchini, and winter squash seeds. 

Once the seeds germinate, they will be okay with a bit more cool weather.

Apple tree maintenance:

Meanwhile, everything else needs your attention! For instance, do you have apple trees?

If so, it’s an optimal time to check on your fruits. This spring, we had fruit set on steroids, where every fruit cluster has four or five fruits, so no time to waste!

To give each fruit the chance to develop into a full-size, healthy apples, it’s a good idea to check your fruiting clusters. When your fruits are about the diameter of a quarter, time to thin! 

Generally, you want to identify the most robust fruit in the cluster, then remove the others. Then, once you’ve thinned your clusters, check the distance between each fruit. Ideally, there should be about 5 inches between fruits. 

If you haven’t been hanging out in your orchard for a while, you may want to check for caterpillar nests too. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest, tent caterpillars are the scourge of home apple growers. My husband John found one nest in two of our apples trees a couple of weeks ago. It was lucky timing: the caterpillars were getting ready to migrate from the nests to devour the leaves.

Happily, he only found the two—but a neighbor had a bad infestation in the wild apples trees on his property line. John and I went out in the pouring rain and cut out the nests—there must have been at least 30 of them—and had an extra benefit! We ended up meeting the neighbor for the first time! 

And if you’re interested in learning all about tent caterpillars… Well, I’ve been through the wringer with those monsters, and I actually wrote a short ebook about them! And it’s free at my website! Just scroll down to “More Free Short Reads.”

In other fruit news…Blueberries:

June is a great time to check for “mummies.” At this point, the healthy blueberries are still green. But any purple ones need to be removed: they’re afflicted with a fungus, called “mummyberry.” Which basically destroys the berry. 

I’ve found that picking off these purple guys, keeps the fungus from spreading throughout the shrub. 

Garlic:

Pointy tips are where the seeds are developing!

If you’re growing hardneck garlic (it has a woody stem in the middle of the bulb), I recommend checking for seed stalks. 

The stalks are called “scapes”—the garlic plant will send up a sturdy shoot from the middle of the leaves, with swelling tip: the bud is a future flower, which will produce seeds. 

These scapes will take the plant’s energy away from the bulb, resulting in smaller bulbs. So time to cut off the stalk! 

Some folks like to use the scapes in cooking, but they seem a little tough to me. 

There’s more about growing garlic and maintaining your orchard in my freebie gardening guide, Little Farm in the Garden…

It’s free on all ebook stores like Amazon, Kobo or Apple and other online retailers!

Berries, A Michigan Backyard Farm, and Jane Austen!

A terrific year for blueberries!

I just can’t keep up…

With our blueberries, I mean. Our shrubs are going nuts this season: I’m harvesting five-six quarts each day, but I can’t pick and process the berries fast enough. 

In fact, I’ve had to stay up late several nights in a row to get the berries into the freezer before the next day’s onslaught of fruit!

I have only myself to blame, though—I didn’t get around to pruning my shrubs back in April. I told myself that missing a year would be okay—and this month, I remembered I’d done only light pruning the year before that.

As a result, some plants are overbearing…so as it turns out, skipping a year was not my best move. And I will probably pay the price with lower production next summer. In any event, I’m planning to give my shrubs a very thorough pruning in the spring.

Still, it’s been fabulous, eating my fill and then some every day this month!

I’ve included my fave blueberry dessert recipe in Jane Austen and the Internet , my August newsletter, just out! Besides a bit about Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility, you’ll find a quick bear update and more. My newsletter is free and open to all, so I hope you’ll take a look!

No time for reading? Here’s a terrific mini-series!

And a treat for food gardeners…

I highly recommend my favorite newsletter, The Suburb Farm, from Erin, a Michigan gardener and beekeeper! 

My family lived in central Michigan during my teen years, and Erin’s lovely, thoughtful gardening newsletter brings back good memories of days gone by. She shares lots of beautiful photos and helpful food gardening tips, and I’ve even learned a fair amount about backyard beekeeping. 

What’s truly amazing is the impressive amount of fruits and veggies she and her family produce from their backyard!

What’s especially fun for me is that her posts and pics remind me of all the Michigan summers that my sister and I picked scads of plums from our backyard tree. Despite the Midwest heat, the two of us would bake every plum dessert you can imagine. 

I imagine your August is crazy busy…but I hope you’ll take a moment to spend some time in a gorgeous Michigan garden! 

Netting Blueberries is for the Birds

New cage around blueberry patch #2

Home gardeners raising blueberries face a built-in problem: unless you protect your shrubs from the birds in bearing season, there’s just no point to growing them!

Blueberries have been my favorite crop since our “olden days,” back in our city garden. With a few bushes here and there, John and I would circle each one with 1-inch poultry fencing, then toss a net on top and call it good.

Unfortunately, we discovered that simple strategy would never cut it at our rural acreage! Not when you’re surrounded by woodlands teeming with hungry, country-smart songbirds. 

And if you’re trying to produce enough berries to freeze for winter eating—with maybe 10 or 15 shrubs—the casual approach to fencing, in my experience, especially doesn’t work.

John and I have two blueberry patches, one with nine shrubs and a second with eight. And the Foothills birds have proved to be relentless about getting at the berries. 

The thing is, netting is a royal pain. It’s time consuming—it takes John and me at least a couple of hours to net one cage, and at least two more hours to take it down after bearing season. With two blueberry areas, that’s over eight hours. And it’s painstaking work to tie down the nets, making sure there are NO gaps or openings.

After many years of experimenting with various fencing/netting designs, trying to protect far larger swathes of ground than we ever had to in the city, John and I were growing more frustrated.

Now robins love blueberries—but it’s actually pretty easy to protect the berries from this bird. They’re one of the larger songbirds, and can’t worm their way into small openings. Finches are another matter—they're fond of berries too, and they will zoom right through 1-inch poultry fencing. So you have to cover the fencing with nets.

Towhees are still another matter: they’re the most inventive and ingenious berry thieves. They are fearless about working their way into netted spaces via the tiniest opening or loose netting.

And there’s another excellent reason to do the best job you can with netting. Sadly, we’ve had more birds caught in loose nets than we care to count. Towhees, those mischievous and full-of-personality birds, are the ones that most often get caught in the nets and die. 

It’s the most forlorn summertime task, to cut precious birds out of a tangled net and bury them.

While birds are one thing, rodents are another. They can easily get through the poultry fencing or under it. We’ve had season after season dealing with chipmunks eating or damaging hundreds of berries. Mice too—and worse, they chew at the roots at the shrub’s crown.

And after trying to get by with poultry fencing and nets, John and I finally realized our higgledy-piggledy fencing/netting would have to go.

About five years ago, John came up with a new plan: a “cage” for blueberries made from ½-inch hardware cloth. Because blueberries can reach up to six to eight feet in height or more, you wouldn’t want to cover the top with any fencing materials. Instead, before the berries begin to ripen, drape netting over the top, making it as taut as possible. 

1st cage John built with netting in place

After he constructed a hardware cloth cage for our older and more productive shrubs, we discovered this method topped with netting has proved to be the most failsafe protection—and also keeps chipmunk incursions down to a minimum.

We always meant to get around to creating a cage for our second patch. Especially after some critter—a raccoon? (Though we’ve never seen one around here.) Or a baby bear? Whatever it was, one night this animal just climbed right on top of our sagging, wobbly netting and tore a gigantic hole in it.

Judging from the damage, it looked the animal just fell smack on top of the shrub. It broke several of the main boughs, and hundreds of smashed berries littered the ground.

Well, no one, and I mean no one messes with my favorite Chandler shrub!

Although a full plate of pressing chores, family commitments and out-and-out procrastination kept us from this project for two or three years, John—with a little help from yours truly—started construction this summer.

We hit a couple of snags—John tried to remove a stump in the patch. It turned out to be cedar, and was as solid as a rock. Then, when we were all set to hand the top row of fence, we discovered we did not have that extra roll of hardware cloth that I thought we had. John had to make a trip to the city and buy more. But we finally finished this second cage yesterday. 

Costs:

Caging your berries is not a cheap date: at 14’ x 24’, and 6’ in height, our second berry patch required a quantity of 3-foot hardware cloth. Which in this inflationary summer cost $250 for 50’. Plus tax.

Doing the math: a 76’ rectangle, with a top and bottom row = 152 feet to enclose the patch. 

Another view of the 2nd patch

We didn’t have to buy all new hardware cloth; this second patch was already partially fenced with this material. In prior years, the cost of hardware cloth was about $140/50 feet. So we sure would have saved money if we’d done this project sooner.

But when you think about it, this fencing will (eventually) pay for itself. Last summer, even with the June heat dome that fried about 25% of our berries, John and I were still able to feast on our homegrown, organic berries all through the bearing season—about 6 weeks. And I ended up freezing about 50 lbs.

If you’re buying local organic blueberries at the store, at around $5/lb, well, there’s $250 right there!

Besides, as I like to say, you can’t put a price on good health. Or succulent blueberries straight from your garden! 

Letting Go...In the Garden and in Life

 Thirteen days ago, in the middle of a drought and harvest time, we had a family emergency.

The garden had already been looking bedraggled. I'd been watering only the most critical crops, and between the historical heat wave in June, followed by grandkid visits, the garden was already sadly neglected. 

But when a family member desperately needed help, despite the heat and all the beds needing water, weeding and harvesting, and my blueberry crop coming in, I had no choice. I had to suddenly leave our place, putting 300 miles between me and Berryridge Farm.

In the moments of emergency, the garden was the last thing on my mind. But when the situation stabilized, everything I'd had to leave behind weighed heavily on my mind. John was home--he'd  returned after giving me a ride to look after the hens. But he had jury duty (talk about difficult timing!), and a couple of important meetings he couldn't miss. It was all he could do to collect the eggs, and keep our girls fed and watered.

With all the heat and drought, my worries about my blueberry crop were first and foremost. We'd already lost our new elderberry shrubs to the heat wave, and 3 of our rhubarb crowns looked like they were dying. I'd planted a bed of shelling peas that I hadn't had time to pick. My carrot bed was ready to harvest, but I couldn't do it before I left. 

But it was my blueberry shrubs, which I'd tended so devotedly for years, that made me sad. Would the shrubs sustain serious drought damage? Were the unpicked berries ripening, then falling to the ground, spoiled? Would we have any harvest at all?

I was stressing about the vegetable beds too. It occurred to me that in this challenging summer and growing season, we might not produce much of anything. It was a hard pill to swallow.

But...I knew I just had to let go. Let go of my food-crop routines, let go of my expectations of running a well-ordered homestead, and most of all, let go of the joy and pride I'd always taken in our garden. 

About 22 pounds in these 2 buckets

The days passed, and the family situation continued to stabilize. I was able to return home the night after last. Despite the long, strenuous days I was away, I was up early, and went into the blueberry patch first thing. And...hurrah!

I had healthy shrubs still laden with ripening berries. We'd had the very unexpected blessing of one inch of rain while I was away, and I think it saved the day. I picked berries for 4 hours straight, and got upwards of 28 pounds of healthy fruit. 

I was feeling so positive I found the energy to clean the coop, then pick the  carrots. They were indeed overgrown, but not a disaster. I harvested about 20 pounds--and a few were a LOT bigger than I'd like!

I hope these carrots aren't woody! Saucer for scale

I was looking over the rest of the garden when I found bear scat right next to our best rhubarb crown. I quickly checked the near vicinity, expecting to see broken apple trees, downed berry netting, or crushed poultry wire, then quickly told John.

He'd already discovered it. In our hurry to leave, we'd left one of our fence gates open. Fortunately, the critter must have just looked around without damaging anything, then left this calling card. Sorry guys, if it grosses you out!

Cub-size scat (I hope!)

And some things you just have to laugh about. We all drop the ball on zucchini now and then, and John discovered these monsters after his own crazy week. I generally find 1 of these every season, so 4 of them shows me 1) what a crazy summer it is, and 2) there's always room in the kitchen compost pile!

Should make good compost!

With all the family visits, I was already neglecting my writing business. And when I got the emergency phone call, I'd been within a week or 2 or publishing my new Irish novel. Yet I had to be philosophical.

The other thing (among many) that I had to let go of was posting on this blog! I was on a streak of weekly posts since early June, but missing last week was simply one more lesson in acceptance. As John would say (I'm sure I've mentioned it in my 2 homesteading memoirs), "It is what it is."

I'm still vowing to get the garden back into some semblance of order, but it'll take time. Meanwhile, I'm focusing on what I can do, doing my best, and remembering what's really important.