Maine Blueberry Picking

One of L's favorite books is Blueberries for Sal by Maine children's author Robert McCloskey. She loves the story of the little girl Sal who sets off with her mother to go blueberry picking in the Maine countryside, and runs into a mama bear and her cub who had similar plans. She was quite thrilled a couple of weeks back when I was in Maine and told her that I got to go blueberry picking with my Mommy (a.k.a Mimi) just like Sal.

The grandmother on my Dad's side still lives in the old farmhouse my Dad grew up in. In the side field there are 6 or 8 pretty big blueberry bushes, each about 6 feet high. They had produced a bumper crop this year. My Dad told me that just that morning my Uncle George and Aunt Julie and had gone out and made the final harvest of the season - they brought Grammy in around 20 quarts! We swung by "the farm" that evening to see my grandmother and my Dad and I, thinking alike as usual, wanted to go out and see if there were any stragglers. We expected it to be slim pickings (quite literally), but even after the morning's final hurrah, we still found the bushes loaded branch on branch.



These blueberries are cultivated and are large and sweet. The wild Maine blueberries you find all over the woods are usually much smaller and a little tarter, but generally more flavorful and prized. Their size makes them pains to pick. (Poor Sal.) These, however, looked like grape clusters and you could pretty much run your fist down a branch and end up with 20 beautiful berries. And I certainly had no complaints about the flavor - Wow!

There were plenty enough to pick for another pie, but unfortunately we hadn't brought any pails, so we had nothing to carry the berries we picked. We were forced to eat them all right there at the bush. Tragedy, huh?