Blueberry Bliss

Homero and Ivory dig holes for the blueberry bushes

Peekaboo

The weather has made a drastic turn for the normal - meaning the temperatures dropped twenty degrees and it's started to rain more or less constantly. That's normal. The sixty-plus degree days, the bright sunshine, the blooming rhododendrons - all very nice I'm sure, but completely out of the ordinary and unnerving for a climate-change believer like myself. I'd rather freeze my tuchus off and feel like all is right with the world than go bodysurfing in November.

Anyway. My ongoing love affair with Craigslist has once again borne fruit (hahaha): blueberry bushes. We love blueberries around here. We also love raspberries and blackberries, but I think blueberries are my favorite. For the last several years, we have picked our blueberries at a wonderful local organic farm called Hannah's blueberries (Enterprise road, for you locals). I love this place for a lot of reasons - tall old bushes, acres to get lost in, a dozen different varieties, only $1 a pound... but still, that didn't stop me from wanting blueberries of my own. Partly because of the self sufficiency game (The self-sufficiency game (love you, Dad)) and partly because blueberries are a gorgeous plant. One thing I am missing here on the farm is some fall color, and nothing has more beautiful fall color than blueberry bushes.

So, when I saw an ad for fully mature blueberry bushes - six to nine feet tall, twelve years old, bearing 10 to 15 pounds of fruit per year, for only $25/bush, I jumped all over it. A local commercial grower was replanting some of his acreage in new varieties, and getting rid of his full-grown Nelson blueberries. He had a 4 bush minimum, so that's what I bought.

As usual, I buy stuff, and the burden of the actual work lands on the wide and capable shoulders of my ever-patient husband. He spent two backbreaking hours in the rain and wind yesterday planting bushes, while I snapped photos and generally stood around feeling useless (back injury, remember?). But I'll make it up to him next summer when I bake him blueberry muffins, pies, biscuits, pancakes....