life is the berries

Being a berry farmer's wife is (firstly, a little strange to be thinking of myself as a wife), and secondly, pretty delicious & interesting. I make it out to the farm everyday & help out in the field. Before you smugly remind me that there might have been a time in my life when I said, "I will NEVER marry a farmer!" let me make an astounding & shameless confession. I love berry farming. Yup, I do. And if Dar ever threatens to get out of it & do something like *shudder* grain farming, I will mutiny. Not that I have to convince you, but here's why (in the spirit of a 6th-grade persuasive essay) I love berry farming.
1) they are delicious. Sososo yummy. So far, my favorite is a medium-large Blue Crop blueberry in the cool of the evening plucked carefully from the end of a cluster (a berry farmer told me this is the prime berry, called the "king berry").
2) they drive the cutest little tractors! (don't tell Dar I said that: he would love to drive something bigger & I suspect, feels slightly less manly because their tractors look like lawnmowers.) Iactually think I will drive one.
3) harvest is intense, but it is only a few months out of the year; what the rest of a berry farmer's year is like remains to be seen, but as much fishing as they do in the spring & fall, I think I hit the jackpot here.
4) everything is so small-scale & manageable. You can do on 5 acres of berries what would take you 10x as many acres for corn. (I'm not sure that sentence makes sense grammatically, but you know what I mean.) I just love that.
5) berries are pretty & quite photogenic. From bloom to perfectly ripe blueberry is an endless supply of photo ops for this girl. And she is quite pleased about this.
6) and have I said yet how much I just love berries?

7) my husband loves his job. He really does, even if he doesn't always think so this time of year. And what he loves, by georgey, I want to love too. Truthfully, if there were a way, every last one of his six brothers would be a berry farmer too. There's got to be something to that, right?
8) my Dad was a farmer & he was a man's man. I can respect farming.
9) It means I can see my dear husband daily & even work with him. Which has made the transition to being married much smoother & really helped our "real-life" relationship, i.e. engaged people don't do laundry, or have to call about insurance or pay rent or live without microwaves or wake up at 4:00 am to go work, but married people do (who knew!?). And guess what? I love being married anyway:).
10) Because you have to have an even number of reasons: Berries make fabulous desserts (Wendy, your blueberry-lemon pound cake was an instant favorite. I've already made it twice.)

I really do love where I'm at. Sitting in my little yellow chair by our less-than-prime 3rd story view overlooking a parking lot in my counterspaceless kitchen, I wouldn't change a single thing.

Oh, and by the way, short economics lesson: The canneries that are buying Sinn Farm blueberries (and everyone else's in the Willamette Valley) are having problems selling the fruit--more supply than demand right now. So do your part & BUY berries! This is our livelihood at stake here.