Annual blueberry picking

I went blueberry picking on Sunday with my dear friends Sherman and Matt.  When some people say blueberry picking, they mean filling up a bowl with enough berries to make a pie or snack on for the week.  When I say blueberry picking, I’m not messing around.  We left with about 100 pounds of huge, ripe, mouth-watering fruits, my hatchback filled on all surfaces with boxes, our fingers stained and our bellies full.  

Blueberries are best picked with buddies

I grew up picking berries and freezing them every summer.  My sisters and I would go with my mom to local strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry fields, bring home buckets, wash and sort them onto towels on the kitchen counter, and let them dry before stuffing and labeling bags destined for our large chest freezer.  Three years ago, I wanted to continue to tradition but didn’t have a big freezer in my new life in Eugene, so I just up and bought one, proceeded to pick 40 pounds by myself at the Blueberry Patch up the McKenzie Highway on a sweltering 95 degree day, and covered my kitchen counters in nostalgic piles of drying berries.  I’ve kept that freezer more or less full of berries, tomatoes, corn, and other random farm delights ever since.

We drove all the way to Anderson’s Blues, a farm north of Corvallis that happens to be Sherman’s family’s favorite spot and the farm down our street where I grew up picking.  As we started harvesting and commenting on the sweetness and size of the berries, I told my friends about how when we were little in this patch, we would find berries wider than a quarter and insist that they needed to be sent in to the Guinness Book of World Records, and we would be forever famous as the pickers of the world’s biggest blueberries.  

I don’t think we ever actually got any in the mail, but the memory remains vivid.  

Taste testing highly encouraged

A couple more buckets and many handfuls of soft berries stuffed into our mouths later, a family comes within earshot of us a few rows away.  The little girl is chattering away at her parents, and we hear her voice drifting playfully through the weighted branches: “Look!!  This is the biggest blueberry in the whole world!”  

We laugh, and time once again spirals around itself to find me, twenty five years ago, running past these same bushes with the biggest blueberry in the whole world cupped in the palm of my hand, tugging on my sister’s shirt to show her and prove that I, too, can find the big ones.  It’s me over there, chattering in the afternoon heat, and it will be that girl again in twenty five years, marveling and relishing the cool pop and sweet drop of big blueberries in the bottom of our buckets.

Sherman in the blueberries

Blueberry haul

Ah yes!  In reality it’s Mama who is right: tanks are perishable, pears are eternal

– Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Spiral tomato time

Time is circular, not linear.  The proof is in the fact that the farm stand, right around mid July each year, starts to fill up with tomatoes.  They trickle in gradually for a few weeks, suddenly bursting in stacks upon stacks of giant red and orange Big Beefs.  And I, year after year, find myself spending more time between the plum and Asian pear trees back there, sorting through the bounty.  It’s the same as always (circular) but I’m thinking different thoughts (linear) but the thoughts reach back and forth between months and years, building on one another until I’m in a wholly new place, wholly new mindset, sorting bright new fruits.  So, I guess that means that time is more of a spiral than a circle or a line.  I can look back into the heart of the spiral, and see myself sorting tomatoes in this very spot last year.  I can squint and look further inside, and see myself sorting tomatoes at Laurel Valley farm in 2011, inundated with them when I first arrived in August.  And I can still feel my hands forming muscle memory and my eyes, honing in on the small scars and cracks that differentiate a market tomato from a restaurant tomato from a CSA tomato, back eight summers ago at Gathering Together Farm.  Years pass, the setting changes around me, and I’m still reaching for tomatoes, cupping their soft skins in the palm of my hand, flipping them over to check for abnormalities, depositing them gently in the appropriate crate.  

Unsorted tomato stacks

Sorting

Orange Zinger cherries

Sorted for CSA

And if I can see out, beyond where I’m now drifting in time, will I still be buried in tomato stacks, passing fruit after fruit between my hands, when I have twice as many wrinkles around my searching eyes?

Over half way

Time passes.  Slowly at times, like when I’m bending to thin lettuce seedlings and my back is barking.  Quickly at others, like when we’re back and forth harvesting a dozen different crops in a morning.  Back and forth between the extremes, every week, every day, every hour.  I realized last week that we’d reached the half way point of the season.  February, March, April, May, and June– the growth period, expansion, push push push– are now gradually falling into the roll-out harvest of July, August, September, October, and November.  We’ve made it past the hump, into full summer abundance, and I continue to be baffled by how quickly things grow, change, and fade.  Last week my Oregon Country Fair vacation was the longest period since January that I’ve been away from the farm– just five days– and it feels as if we’re already suddenly in a different period.

Fall seeding

Mid summer on a farm really means pre-autumn.  We’ve been seeding dozens of flats of fall and winter crops over the past few weeks, filling the outdoor nursery with seedlings that need more protection from sun and heat than from cold and frost.  Four varieties of broccoli, three of overwintering cauliflower, Champion collards, purple and white kohlrabi, escarole and radicchio, Chinese cabbage, around eight varieties of cabbage…. As we just barely start to harvest flowers and hotly anticipate the onset of corn and melons, I’m looking ahead to morning fog sparkling golden atop newly planted winter cabbages.  A farmer’s imagination.  It’s a beautiful enough thought on these hot, sweaty afternoons, but it’s not hard to let it go as I smell fresh onions being peeled, taste one of the last juicy red plums, and pluck a full palmful of a red ripe tomato from the greenhouse.  No need for imagination, I guess, when what’s in front of me is infinitely captivating.