After dinner this evening, I went out to pick some blueberries. Not on the Aerie's slopes but up the hill in the state forest. There's a section that was logged a couple of years ago and where the wildlife folks erected a fence to keep the deer out while the saplings got a foothold. The fence also keeps the bears out.
The fence has two gravity operated, trap door style gates that permit access to the fenced enclosure. You're allowed to go inside to hunt or whatever. I went there earlier in the week to do a little birding and found several patches of blueberries. I only had a plastic bag in my pocket (just in case)and found that inconvenient as the twigs and blackberry canes easily ripped the bag. Still I came back to the house with two cups of very large, juicy blueberries.
Today, I went back with a 2 quart TupperWare container and in about 45 minutes of picking managed to harvest a quart of blueberries. Most came from a patch I did not pick the last time and these were pretty decent sized berries. They may not have been as large as the ones you can buy in the store but they were among the largest I've picked in the wild...well except for those I found in Wharton State Forest in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. But those hardly count. They were high bush berries as opposed to the low bush I was picking here. Furthermore, those in the Pines were probably from an abandoned blueberry farm. (Side note: Nearly all the blueberries sold on the east coast and on up through Canada come from Hammonton, NJ in Burlington County which is on the west side of the Jersey Pines.)
Like the berries I picked the other day, they got placed into Zip-Loc bags and placed in the freezer. They will one day end up in pancakes, muffins, or buckle.
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