Berry Pickin'

Here in Bellingham it is berry season--blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and on and on. You can buy them in local stores like anywhere else in the country. But here in Bellingham, on a nice summer day, going berry picking is so much fun. Relaxing, meditative, the birds are singing, you can hear the breeze, smell the warm berries on the vines and that is exactly what we did the other day.

Raspberry picking to be exact. We need a bunch of berries this season for the big party approaching in September.

Leslie and I stopped at Barbie's Berry Farm stand out in the county. The county north of town is dotted with summer farms that grow all sorts of summer time treats-corn, squash, berries, you name it. Barbie's specializes in berries. We each picked up a couple of the little white buckets found at every farm and headed down a random row of berries. The bright red berries dotted the vines as far as the eye could see. The darker red the berry the riper the fruit.

Our first row didn't seem to have many berries as ripe as we'd like to pick, so we finally walked on through to the next set of rows and what a gold mine! The berries practically fell off the vines into the buckets. Before no time I was on to my second bucket and then on to my third. Leslie got her three as well and after a couple of hours we finally re-emerged from the rows to pay for our bonanza. The berries were weighed and we discovered that we had picked 30 pounds of them.

Now we found raspberries on sale for about $5-$6 a pound in local grocery stores and I can't imagine paying $150 for those 30 pounds of raspberries. But not if you pick them yourself. Most area farmstands are selling them for $1.50-$1.75 per pound if you pick them. So we headed home with our berries with the idea to rinse and freeze most of them. Raspberries are very fragile and won't last long so this is a great way to preserve them and have great tasting berries throughout the winter months.

After a quick rinse and allowing them to dry on a few layers of paper towel, spread them out on baking sheets, freeze them and then seal them in freezer bags. When we need a few we just scoop the needed amount out of the bag and plop them in a pie or cobbler or over cereal throughout the winter and those warm, breezy summer days come flooding right back.

In a couple of weeks we will go out blackberry picking to go along with the blueberries and raspberries and we'll have a wonderful supply of berries for our cobblers at the big party in September.

Wish you were here!