First day of blueberry harvest! The fields are a sea of violet, the berries large and fragrant, and the farm in full swing (we are also harvesting broccoli and early butternut squash..). Here is the journey a Stahlbush Blueberry travels before it comes to your grocery store freezer.
First of all, blueberry bushes take time to come into full production… anywhere from 6-7 years to really yield highest quality and quantity of fruit. Blueberry bushes can then go on to produce fruit for nearly 30 years. We grow many varieties of blueberries so that the fruit ripens over a little longer period of time and doesn’t overwhelm our ability to harvest the fruit at its peak. The Stahlbush blueberry fields are coming into their prime fruit-bearing years and take a lot of love and attention year round with trimming and tying up, weeding, watering, and feeding the plants nutrients.
Once the bushes set fruit, our “birds of prey” sound machine keeps flocks of birds from coming in and feasting. A few deer wander through, but in general, the deer don’t care for the openness of the fields and prefer to hug the perimeters along the Willamette River. The ripe berries are harvested by hand, early in the day if possible to prevent harvesting during the desiccating hours of hot sun (it’s 90 degrees here today in Corvallis). Machine picking technology is available and we may go to this method at some point. But for now, hand picking is the best way to get the most high quality fruit and care for the bushes. The flats of picked berries are brought into cold storage right here at the farm and queue up to be sorted, washed, and frozen.
This morning I walked into the chiller and the first thing I noticed was the blueberry-infused air….an absolutely delightful aromatherapy moment. The blueberries are poured onto a moving berry-ladder and then dropped into a large bin where they are air cleaned. This removes leaves and twigs. Next the blueberries gently roll over a de-stemmer and past an optics system that hunts for and rejects any imperfect berries, i.e. under ripe, mashed or misshapen. Then it’s off to a cool water wash that removes any remaining dust particles. They are then carried past a team of inspectors looking for any blueberries that might have snuck through unripe or still wearing a stem (this morning we saw a couple blueberries that had a tiny bit of blueberry flower bud attached. Didn’t hurt the taste a bit!)
After a final rinse, the berries are ready to enter the freezer tunnel and be flash frozen individually (we call this IQF or Individually Quick Frozen.) You might think that these processing steps would in some way damage the fruit, but as I looked at the finished IQF Blueberries this morning coming off the line, I was astounded by how perfectly formed the fruit is. A perfect frozen blueberry takes masterful, sustainable farming and an exquisitely high level of expertise at the plant processing level. The blueberries are dropped in a bag and shipped to your store and all you taste is Oregon sun, rain and the terroir of the region. Full disclosure: I work here at the farm, so my high opinion of these blueberries may sound biased. But nevertheless I am a berry aficionado and these are the best blueberries on the planet! (And for further evidence here’s one of my kids grazing like a bear cub out in the Stahlbush blueberry fields…)
