Wild Blueberries

Have you ever seen anything more gorgeous?

Just wait till you find some to taste!

Spent another week at the farm. The garden is just exploding with produce right now. Only slightly earlier than previous years... but it's enough to have us all running around picking, pickling, blanching and freezing, etc.

But one can only do that for so long!  So, we (my mother, sister and I) took an hour out of our afternoon to go wild blueberry picking.

Nothing - I mean NOTHING - tastes like a wild blueberry. Those monstrous things in the stores called blueberries are watery cardboard compared to these.

Seriously.

If I put store bought (even market BC blueberries) on a tray with these tiny wild blueberries, Londyn will always eat the wild ones first.  They're just that good. Toddler approved!

(Yes, these are quite the electric blue on the bush, before being handled and the powder all rubs off)

The berries this year are a bit larger than I remember them being last year. 

I attribute that to heat and rain cycle we've been getting this summer.  Same for the garden.

The bushes are quite low to the ground, no more than 6 to 8 inches high.  You really have to crouch down to pick them, but it's oh so worth it!

Londyn would stand beside us eating right off the bush as we picked :)

With blueberries are a couple of companions....

Low bush cranberries - seen here.  They literally grow along the ground.

These ones obviously aren't ripe yet, but they will be by early fall when the blueberry season is wrapping up.

The important thing to note is that they have a blossom end.

Why is that important?

Because there's another low/on the ground berry that grows with blueberries and cranberries... 

My mother/aunts/baba/etc call it 

Dog Berry - because it makes you as sick as a dog!

Unfortunately I don't know the actual name. I would look it up but I don't have my books with me.

It does NOT have a blossom on the end. It's just a dot with maybe a tiny "stem" sticking out.  

Don't pick'em.  Don't eat'em.

An hour's worth of berries yielded only about 6-8cups between the 3 of us. Some of that is due to us not being the first ones through that berry patch (we think we got the second ripening) and that we had 2 children to chase around while doing so.

My mother's friend lives just down the road from the farm (15min drive) and her farm has a huge wild blueberry patch!  We'll be going there for our next endeavour :)

What's your favourite berry to go picking?  U-pick farms allowed ;)