Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Communing with nature... delicious nature...

Today was my extra day of work, but it went pretty well. I didn’t waste any time in the evening, either – right after supper I went out and picked more blueberries!

This time I went behind the house again – there was a big patch just beyond the edge of the yard, and then I worked my way back through a band of trees to another sandy area at the edge of the Sand Point Marsh. I worked around the edges – not much grows in the sand out in the open, just under the trees. There were a few good patches, and a few with some berries that weren’t ripe yet – and a few patches of taller bushes that had very green berries on them! I’m not sure if those were blueberries but they looked about the same, so we’ll see. (I checked the Wild Berries and Fruits guide at the visitor center and there are several things I may have been picking out here – a couple of varieties of blueberries, black huckleberries, and even something called bilberries – but they’re all pretty much interchangeable as far as eating them goes!)

It was really neat being alone back there. I could hear the strange hooting call of the sandhill cranes, even though I didn’t see them. (It seriously sounds like something out of the Jurassic Park movies. I even saw the tracks… I have dinosaurs in my backyard!)

And then I saw a deer! I didn’t scare it out, I just looked over and realized there was a deer looking back at me, a little ways off. We were both a bit surprised – and then it left fairly quickly.

At this point I decided to stop picking, because I was having a hard time seeing the blue color of the berries – it was getting to be dusk. I had been out there for over an hour! I started working my way back, trying to spot where I had come through the trees. I didn’t quite take the same path back, but I came out in sight of the house so it worked out all right. It was a lovely evening, out there in between the trees and under the sky… and I got almost three cups of blueberries! About a quart, with what was left over from the other night!


This is about the actual size.

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