Harvesting ripe blueberries a ticklish task

On a dewy August morning I walk through wet grass to the garden, one hand grasping a mug of steaming coffee, the other a bowl for berries. I have to rest them on a rock to swing back the fence gate. For years we gardened without this fence, but this spring, when deer came and ate more than their share of raspberry canes and blueberry flower buds, we fenced them out.

Opening the gate flushed eight blue jays from the garden. Until the blueberries ripened, there were never more than two.

I walk past the raspberry beds and the need to pick and toss moldy berries, the fate of raspberries in a rain-soaked season. I make an early breakfast of ripe Sungold tomatoes and check to see whether any cucumbers are long enough for harvest, but otherwise stay focused on the task at hand, beating the jays to the blueberries.

High-bush blueberry shrubs grow in Marjorie’s garden and on this morning their branches bend under the weight of ripe berries. We picked a few berries from these shrubs in July, but early August is the peak of harvest.

We have anticipated this morning since early spring when Marjorie pruned each dormant blueberry shrub, scrutinizing its potential for fruiting and form. She removed dead, damaged, and diseased branches, as well as spindly side branches with few flower buds. She cut away the witches’ brooms, dense masses of short, thick, twisted stems caused by a fungus that requires as its secondary host balsam fir, of which there are plenty in the woods around the garden. She renewed the compost mulch around each shrub. All of this before the leaf buds started to grow.

In June we went to the garden to watch native bees pollinate blueberry blossoms. Bumblebees will leave catnip flowers for blueberry nectar. They are a joy to watch as they forage from first light to last, stopping to rest only in a cold rain when they seek refuge under a leaf or flower cluster. On chilly mornings we might find an immobile bumblebee that spent the night on the last flower visited, too cold at dusk to fly to its underground nest, and we watch as it finds its legs in the sun’s warmth.

This morning I will fill the bowl with blueberries, big, juicy, plump, each ripe berry gently tickled from its slender stalk. I hold my cupped hand beneath a cluster of berries – some further along toward full ripeness than others – and move my fingers over the berries as if tickling the bottom of a child’s foot. Only the ripest berries break their fragile connection and fall into my hand, dark purple-black fruits bursting with sweetness.

I eat a few berries as I am picking, some imperfect from the pecking of jays that now sit in the top of the nearby wild cherry, squawking at my interruption of their feast. The filled bowl goes to the kitchen for breakfast.

The harvest will last until mid-August. The shrubs, while growing larger every year, have yet to yield more than we can eat fresh from the garden. One year soon, we hope, there will be a surplus to freeze.

The joy of growing high-bush blueberry shrubs does not end with the harvest. In October their scarlet red and golden yellow leaves will draw us to the garden, autumn color at another level.

Meanwhile, August is for tickling blueberries.

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