Rainforests and Blueberries

Well, it is definitely summertime over here.  This week has been full of VBS prep, summer crafts, and swim lessons--love it!

One of my most favorite things about summer, though, is the food!  I love veggies and get all excited at the wealth of good-looking produce in the grocery store.  You know, tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes.  And summer berries, yum!

I gave the whole blueberry-picking thing a break last summer after our little ordeal two years ago.  But with that memory sufficiently faded, Anna and I embarked on a blueberry-picking trip a few weeks ago, and it was a great success--lot of berries, no drama!

First, I picked a new patch a little closer to home--I'd read good Yelp reviews about Yancey's Blueberries in Silver Springs, and that's an easy one-hour drive from our house.  We dropped Will off at school a little early, and then headed west.

I just have to include a picture of Will, though--they were having Habitat Day in his class and he'd been assigned the rainforest habitat.  I was thrilled, because we just happened to have lots of rainforest-y stuff for him to dress up in.

The only thing I helped with was mounting the green squares with his rainforest facts.  I thought he did such a cute job with his drawings.

Anna decided she wanted to dress up like a rainforest explorer, too, and I didn't argue since the camo hat provided good sun protection:

From school, we drove to the blueberry patch and got there about 8:30 am, which was perfect, since the  morning was still nice and cool.  The blueberry bushes were loaded with huge quarter-sized berries:

We picked for a little over an hour.  Anna did well at first:

But then she fell over and about half her berries went into the sand.  I think that sort of killed her momentum.  She wasn't sad for long, but spent the rest of her time running up and down the rows and playing in the sand.

We ended up with sixteen pounds of berries!  Here's Anna with our haul:

That sounds like a lot of berries, but we can put away the blueberries quite well over here!  I ended up freezing a third of them, then made a batch of jam:

I used the recipe in the Ball pectin box and rigged up a canner from my biggest stock pot and a collapsible veggie steamer.  I was so thrilled it worked; I'm making all sorts of plans to can salsa and chow-chow this summer.  Not that I need another hobby. :-)

And what happened to the rest? I made some blueberry muffins and this recipe for Blueberry Boy Bait (which was popular with both boys in this household).  And then we ate the rest--two large Tupperware bowls full--in about 4 days.  Yum!