Long ago and far away (you’ll remember, I’m 
sure) I visited a place called the Blueberry Farm Park in Tacoma. It was a very old blueberry farm where the original farmers were long gone, as were their farm buildings and their home.
When I first visited there (first photo below), the farm and the blueberry bushes could hardly be found among the blackberries and other invading shrubbery, though there was some evidence of blueberries (including one, lone blueberry that tempted me to pick it).
Well yesterday, on a bright and sunny day, I just happened to drive by that same Blueberry Farm Park on my way to some important chore, and I turned my head to the left and … oh my goodness, the farm has been cleaned up!
Look at this! Obviously, a whole bunch of people worked really hard to clean out this place. Kudos to them.
The plants were beautiful … and apparently healthy. They were all moving into their autumn color and it was so pretty.
The photo below is one I took of a solid mass of blueberry bush on that last visit over a year ago, in the summer last year.
The photo below is a photo from this current visit … the “solid” mass of blueberry bush was now showing its brilliant red autumn stem color and it had lost almost all of its leaves, heading into winter.
It’s amazing to me how plants know what to do. How do they know?
I love comments! Please comment! 🙂 Teach me how plants turn red in the autumn. Talk to me about blueberries … how they grow, your favorite recipe. Tell me about your favorite berry plants where you live. What’s your favorite photo in this particular blog? It’s all good and I’d love to hear from every one of you no matter where you live in the world.
Speaking of “the world”, I’m noticing in the stats that there are a number of people in the Philippines who have started reading this blog. Kumusta! Salamat!
Hi Ann…so glad someone cleaned up the blueberry farm. I am not a big fan of blueberries (at least the ones we get in our stores with no flavor). I bought some frozen Maine blueberries this summer, and made a pie. They were good!
My fave berries are blackberries, strawberries, and marionberries.
Store-bought blueberries sure don’t have as much flavor as fresh ones, do they. Even so-called “fresh” blueberries, in the store. Like you, I find the frozen ones are better, more juicy and flavorful. But oh my marionberries! Oh my I do love marionberries! Especially marionberry pie. 🙂 Yum yum!
That is so exciting! I used to pick berries at a huge blueberry farm…so many varieties that the season was really long. Every time I went they’d let you taste samples of what was available to pick that day and you got to choose…sweet or tart, big or small. It was so much fun. Since then I know the farmer has died and I often wonder what happened to the farm. It’s a long way away so odds aren’t good I’ll ever drive by. Maybe I should make it a trip just to see, but part of me doesn’t want to see it in disrepair. I’m very happy your blueberry farm is being taken care of again!
So you are a pro! Wow, I didn’t know! 🙂 And I didn’t know there were varieties of blueberries. Holy cow, there’s so much I don’t know.
Yep, sure understand how you feel about going back to that farm and maybe finding it a mess. Might be better just to imagine that it’s perfectly cared for by the new folks who own it. Pretend the photos of my blueberry farm are actually your blueberry farm.
Wow, tasting and choosing which ones you get to pick. I’d love that. Tho I might have to taste for quite a long while. 🙂
I love the close-up photo of the stunning reds and yellows of one frond of the blueberry bush, and then to see a chunk taken out of one of the leaves. Ahh nature.
I grew up in the Kootenays, and for us there were two kinds of berries. Raspberries were grown in big, long patch near the house and we were forever having to pick ice cream pails full of them and then my mum would have to make the jam. And, of course, this being summer, that was not a fun project what with sterilizing jars and processing the bubbling fruit. But the taste always takes me back to my childhood.
The other berries I remember didn’t just grow just anywhere – they were the huckleberries. You had to go out in the woods for them, and of course, watch out for bears!
Oh, and my mum had a bush of blackcurrants as well – they have a very distinct flavour, perhaps because my Nana was British, my mum grew them. Those seemed to ripen all at once, she would pick them with good intentions, and then freeze them, hoping to get time between raspberry duties to make black currant jam, but I am sure there are several bags languishing in the bottom of the deep freeze.
Very exciting to have readers from the Philippines! Welcome, and hello from Canada.
Oh yes, then there are raspberries! oh yum! My folks had a small raspberry patch too … had almost forgotten about it. My mom tells how she knew exactly where to find me if the raspberries were ripe and she was trying to find me outside. Yep, mostly made into jam, but my mom also strained the berries and made jelly. Now that seemed like a tedious process and, to my 11-year-old mind, a great waste of the fruit itself.
I know nothing about huckleberries. And I’d just as soon not know too much about bears! 🙂
Blackcurrants … I don’t know about those either, but they sound delicious.
The list of countries where people are that read this blog has now risen to 41 countries. I love that. The “regulars” are from Canada, USA, UK, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, South Africa, and now the Philippines. Aren’t we wonderful? 🙂