We were blueberry picking the other day and I turned my back for a minute and heard the sound of far more fun than can ever be had picking blueberries. They had, of course, found mud.

It obviously could have been a lot worse. They could have been up to their waists in it. They could have disappeared into the bog, only to be discovered twelve centuries later, with alien archaeologists determining they were creatures who subsisted on a diet entirely of blueberries. Who, you might ask, lets his son wear a white t-shirt while blueberry picking? Apparently I do. 


The only casualties were their shoes, which I had to reach in and slurp out of where they were lodged deep inside the mud. Gross.


Once we got back to picking, we managed a sixteen-pound haul. At $1.60 a pound, that was a lot of blueberries for not a lot of money. The kids were particularly sweet about sharing blueberries with each other as we picked:


And they ate liberally from my buckets as we went along. 


At home,we made about ten more jars of blueberry jam, and about ten jars of blueberries preserved whole in a simple syrup (which we'll use for pancakes all winter). The rest we ate right out of the refrigerator until they were gone.

 

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Blueberries are our #1 fruit around here; half of my son's daily caloric intake probably comes from blueberries in some form or another: blueberry yogurt, blueberry pancakes, blueberry muffins, blueberry juice, or blueberries themselves. This is the first year he's really capable of picking them himself so we've been looking forward to our annual trip over to Washtenaw County's blueberry fields for many months. Unfortunately, it took him forever to figure out how to pick blue ones and leave the green ones. The face above is the one he made every time he bit into a green berry.

Every taste of green berry sent him over to me to beg for a nice deep blue one.

And I'd oblige. . .

And he'd stand in the middle of a bush full of ripe berries until he was ready to beg for some more.

The girl, however, is becoming a real pro. Last year she contributed nothing to the daily haul, but this year after we picked for a few minutes I glanced into her bucket and actually saw berries accumulating:

She picked 3.5 pounds in less than an hour! And she was pretty proud while she helped make those berries that started their day on the bush finish their day preserved in jars on our shelf.

 

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