Blueberry tally

Phew! I was able to boot my manuscript out the door this afternoon (Thursday) around 12:30, plenty of time for my East Coast editor to acknowledge receipt. After getting up at 3 am all week to write, tomorrow I plan to sleep in.

In the meantime, though, I thought you might be interested in our final blueberry tally.

Last year, I harvested a bit over 57 lbs. of blueberries. That was an overwhelming quantity, especially since I still had blueberries left over from the previous year, so I canned up the entire amount and gave a lot of it away to folks in our church.

This year, I knew I was on track to harvest a whole lot more blueberries. While I didn't think I would quite double the harvest, I thought I might be getting close. I started picking on June 27, and picked the last fruit of the season on September 2. At the height of the harvest, sometimes I was picking for four hours at a time. Our old craft-booth umbrella really helped during these marathons, since I was able to use it for movable shade.

But this year we made a change. Rather than saving up all the fruit and then canning it, it occurred to us that the blueberries could be a cash crop. Accordingly we did a little bit of modest local advertising ("Organic, freshly frozen, local"), and sold quite a bit.

I kept a tally of how many pounds I sold. Sales happened in dribs and drabs; a few pounds here, a few pounds there. When that petered out, I removed the advertising and just sat on the frozen berries.

About a week ago, we heard from a couple who was interested in purchasing a decent amount, and I knew it was time to tally the remaining fruit I had on hand. Besides, I didn't know what the weight of the final harvest was anyway, so I was curious to find out.

This tub was filled with about two-thirds of the harvest (photo was taken August 10).

I tallied the amount of berries we sold, then weighed the remaining amount of fruit in the freezer.

Are you ready for this? I harvested 92.5 lbs. of blueberries! Of this, we sold 60 lbs. and we still have 32.5 lbs. in the freezer.

For visual impact, Don made a bar graph showing the nearly exponential increase in fruit over the past four years. (Note the bars are in BLUE, ha ha.)

Blueberries can produce for something like 25 years, and I don't believe ours are anywhere near mature yet. I have a feeling we'll be selling a lot of freshly frozen blueberries in the future.