Growing up in the sticks, we were surrounded with hills full of wild blueberries. For about a month in the fall, the ground was covered in blue, and we kids knew that anything we picked could be sold to elderly pie baking neighbors quite easily.
Now for those readers that have picked cultivated “tame” blueberries, the wild experience and taste is quite different. Cultivated blueberries are massive in size and can be found on convenient waist high bushes. Wild blueberries are tiny pellets full of taste and can be found on the back breaking ground.
Picking…I mean eating…was a treat on the first day. By the end of the month with us being out in the bush day in, day out, picking, we would chat about our blueberry nightmares (I used to, for some reason, dream about Smokey the Bear…Remember only you can prevent forest fires). Our finger tips were blue for months after.
Learning
Insist on quality the first time. The only thing worse than picking the berries was cleaning them of sticks, bugs, and leaves. My not-so-sweet Grandma (also known as the best chocolate chip cookie baker in the world) told us to pick clean and pick fast or we’d get the bucket (a berry bucket thrown at our heads…told you she wasn’t so sweet). If we picked clean, it saved a lot of work.
There’s always someone bigger and hairier who wants the product more. Often we’d be picking right next to the bears. There were plenty of berries, it didn’t make sense to fight the bears for them. Made more sense to go where they weren’t.
