August 11: Waxwings in the blueberries

My mother's birthday.
Waxwings gorge on blueberries,
a happy flock.

And Mom, you'll appreciate this: later in the day, the blueberries were approached by an acquisitive family of four crows that strutted together right down the driveway for a snack, much to the annoyance of the local Blue Jays.

August 8: Winnowing

I spent the afternoon selling organic blueberries at the Land Trust's blueberry stand on Beech Hill, as the berry crew worked busily behind me feeding boxes of freshly raked berries through the winnower (which removes the leaves and greenies). Boxes and boxes of berries, berries rolling past on the conveyer, squished on the floor, piling up in buckets...

 

The winnowers

will dream streams of berries,

hear their rolling thunder.

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July 11: Ripening and blooming

This morning I had to laugh as a catbird emphatically "chuck-chuck chuck-chuck'ed" in the blueberry bush, staring at the hard green berries as if willing them to ripen. 

Later, at home, I collected a shirt full of cherry tomatoes from my hanging tomato plant, warmed by the sun and so sweet when popped in my mouth. Meanwhile, many of the flowers in my garden are in bloom or ready to bloom--the deep orange Embers of Vesuvius day lily is loaded with long buds, and the echinacea patch looks about ready to unfurl its petals and show its many faces.

Catbird and I, both

impatient for blueberries

just now blushing pink.

August 24: Still summer

The nip of fall may be creeping into the morning air, and the song of the crickets may be slowing down to a more languorous, late summer pitch, but summer still holds sway. On this blue sky morning I'm still wearing tank top and flip flops, wishing I could be outside at play rather than at work--because we all know this won't last.

Still fresh blueberries
on my cereal, still
hummingbirds in the bee balm.

July 29: Blueberries

Tonight I know I'll be dreaming of blueberries. Even now I can still see them in my mind, piles of the blue-red berries cascading off the winnower in a never-ending stream...

Coastal Mountains Land Trust, for which I work, runs an organic blueberry farm at its Beech Hill Preserve in Rockport. For about a month in the middle of each summer, we harvest the fruit to sell; the blueberry sales thus support the upkeep of the preserve, a popular place to hike and observe nature (it's on the Maine Birding Trail too--stop #31!). Although today was my day off, I don't often get to spend time at the hill when the blueberry harvest is going on. That's not my department. So I volunteered to work at the farm stand for the day just to be a small part of one of our more exciting and enjoyable projects.

Mostly I sold quarts of berries to preserve visitors while the farm workers winnowed. Our winnower is a behemoth of a machine that sucks in boxes of blueberries just as they were raked in the fields, with all the twigs, leaves, unripe berries, and other detritus, and spits out whole, clean blueberries at the other end. Here's a photo of me helping out a few years ago with the end of the winnowing process, quality-checking the final products (i.e. removing the rejects by hand) as the berries roll past one last time into waiting boxes:

In the photo above it doesn't look like there are a lot of berries there, but that's only because they had to slow the process way down for me, a non-professional, so I could more thoroughly pick out the unwanted berries that made it through the winnowing process and properly meet our quality standards. The farm workers--today a team of young women who have worked for us for several summers and really know what they're doing--can pick through a full conveyor belt of berries moving at a very fast speed while talking on their cell phones. The end result is quarts of super-clean berries of very high quality. What you don't see are the buckets and bins full of the reject berries and other material, twigs and little green berries and squished berries that stain everything--the machine, the workers, the floor, the boxes--purple.

To occupy myself today when not selling quarts, chatting with preserve visitors, or replenishing quarts from the winnower, I picked through several buckets full of the rejected berries, etc. to get myself a full quart. It took me most of the afternoon, and my fingers are now stained a deep purple. I'm literally marked by the experience. But I've got more fresh berries in the refrigerator, ample reward for today's work on the farm. 

Fingers tattooed blue.
Rolling berries, more berries,
when I close my eyes.

July 24: Morning ritual

Although I love mornings--the light, the birdsong, the promise of the day ahead--I'm not a "morning person." I just wasn't made that way. So I try to follow a morning ritual, of sorts, to help me ease into the day calmly: a word game on my iPad, the daily New York Times crossword puzzle, my usual bowl of cereal (sharing the milk at the bottom of the bowl with the cat), perhaps an early round of the flower beds dead-heading the day lilies. Then, with everything in order, I step out into the rest of my day...

Slow start--dove's soft coo,
cereal with fresh berries,
a crossword puzzle.

June 19: Unripe berries

Over the next day, as this hemisphere officially shifts into summer, a heat wave is supposed to kick the temperature up about 20 degrees, into the 80s. Summer is truly upon us at last, thankfully, and the fruits of the season are getting ready. Outside my office the high-bush blueberries are laden with unripe fruit, funky, pale green globes creating their own clustered galaxies in the universe of our lawn. Within the month we should be enjoying our berries--or at least, those that the crows, jays, squirrels, and random passers-by don't eat first. But right now, on summer's cusp, the eve of Midsummer's Eve, those hard berries in first blush hold pure promise of things to come. 

Already a crow
eyes the unripe blueberries--
it, too, has to wait.

Gratuitous lupine shot, also taken in office yard

April 9: Blossoming blueberries!

That almost sounds like something Captain Haddock from the Tin Tin series would say, in lieu of his usual, "Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles!" The often-tipsy Captain Haddock would at least appreciate that I've been forcing a blueberry sprig this spring in an old tequila bottle vase, even if he might not notice the subtle beauty of the little white bells of its blossoms.

Several weeks ago I snapped a dry and bare twig from a patch of blueberry bushes alongside a trail on Ragged Mountain. For a long time, nothing seemed to happen. But slowly the twig has leafed out and is now flowering. Such a tiny, wondrous thing right here in my kitchen, while outside the plants still awaken from their long winter's nap.

We call it "forcing,"
but these blueberry flowers
open with such grace.

November 8: Seeing Red

Late fall the landscape begins to wither and fade. While trees are still hanging onto a surprising number of leaves, they're duller, burnished browns now. Grasses are dried up, flowers gone. So as I drove to Augusta this afternoon I was surprised to see nature's most vivid color suddenly blazing forth. Red! I put on the brakes as I came upon a small blueberry barren, its brilliant crimson emphasized by remnant patches of snow lingering in a shady corner. Is there any red more breathtaking than an autumn blueberry barren?

Blueberry barrens in Hope, Ragged Mountain in background

Maybe... Heading up Route 17 I was then struck by another vision of red: amid the dried-up reeds and blown-out cattails of a small wetland, a winterberry bush shone forth, its berries glowing in the sunlight like Rudolph's nose (as seen in the traditional holiday special with Burl Ives). Further along, more clumps of berry bushes popped out, exclamations along the way.

The sun was sinking low as I returned from Augusta a few hours later, washing the trees with that last rich light of the day. The mellow brown leaves were transformed into a breathtaking coppery bronze. With trees lining both sides of the road, it was like driving through a corridor lit by a living, reddish glow, enhanced all the more by a crisp, clear blue sky backdrop containing the almost full moon. Now the winterberries blurred together into a haze of color as I drove past. The scarlet of the blueberry fields deepened. If I were an artist and tried to paint with those reds, it would look unreal, unnatural. But there I was, surrounded by them. Real life red, almost pulsing.
Before all goes white,
red appears: blueberry fields
and winterberries.

August 4: A Bird in the Hand Is Worth...

While working intensely at my desk this morning, focused, busy, intent on what I was doing, a flash of movement out the window caught my eye. I looked up and had to laugh out loud: two crows were precariously balanced on the slender branches of the nearest high bush blueberry. A third was perched on a nearby post, overseeing the antics. The two birds in the bush were doing their best to keep their balance while grabbing as many fat blueberries as they could. As close as they were in that tiny bush, they looked huge. I could see that the mantle of one of the birds had a brown cast to it, it was that near.

I've seen blue jays and catbirds tempted by those berries, but until yesterday, never a bird as large as a crow. Yesterday's crow simply snatched berries from the stable perch of the post at the end of the driveway. Today's two birds were a bit more ambitious, and acrobatic. It was truly entertaining to watch those ungainly crows clutching the twiggy branches for dear life while daintily plucking at the ripe berries.

A fourth crow flew toward them to join in the fun, but then the lookout bird cawed, and they all flew off up the driveway together. But it wasn't long before a couple of them returned. Then later I heard a racket of crows yelling frantically across the river at something, probably some kind of hawk or an unlucky roosting owl. That was apparently distracting enough that they didn't get back for more berries today. But I'll look for them tomorrow for more amusement.

Too much temptation:
two crows in a too-small bush
plucking ripe berries.

After first witnessing this entertaining activity outside my window, I called in my co-worker to see, but the birds were already in flight by the time he arrived. So he told me a story about how when he was five, playing with a friend at the playground, a crow flew up and landed on his shoulder. The two boys were thrilled, naturally, and he walked home with the crow still perched there. It stayed with him as they continued playing in the back yard, till at one point his mother looked out and noticed their avian companion. ("It followed us home, Mom. Can we keep it?") She realized that no wild bird would be this tame, so she called someone--who do you call when you find a tame crow?--and eventually tracked down the crow's owner. Despite it being a pet, there's still got to be something special about being picked out by a crow like that.

July 12: Blue Jays and Blueberries

This afternoon I was still working in my office when our director left for home. We had the door open so the faint breeze could help dissipate the heat in our non-air-conditioned space, and I could hear him talking to someone outside. It sounded like he was telling them to go away. Curious, I went to the doorway. I expected to see a stray dog, but he was apparently alone, so I asked him whom he had been talking to. "The blue jays," he said. "They're eating our blueberries!" He then proceeded to bang some things together to scare them further off across the parking lot.

I realized then that I had been hearing the racket of blue jays outside for a good part of the afternoon without being consciously aware of what I was hearing. The jays are regular visitors, and this time of year they're always kvetching and caviling around the office in their family groups. I'd grown used to them, I guess, and had blocked the noise while I was working. They were especially excited this afternoon because they'd found an edible treasure trove--the high bush blueberries right outside our office doorway were finally ripening.

Actually, I don't think today was the first day they had discovered the berries. I think they've had their beady black eyes on them all along, just waiting for the peak moment to raid the blueberry patch. Today was the day. Thanks to the commotion, now we knew, too. After they flew off, a co-worker and I went out and picked a bowlful, missing enough berries, I'm sure, to keep the jays happy. After we went back inside, not a minute passed before I heard a jay back in the dogwood next to the berry bushes. These birds are not stupid. They keep an eye on everything.

Blue skies in July,
blue jays in the blueberries--
all as it should be.