like pearls on a string: farmlife issue no. 12

I got such a fun response to my last post about blueberry harvest! You guys had some great questions & seriously, I love to share about harvest. It's only my 4th summer of it, & I'm still learning & loving it. Blackberry harvest is in full swing now, too. This is a little glimpse of that. (I think I enjoy blackberry harvest even more than blueberries. It's mostly just family that helps & it feels so...nostalgic.

This is a berry harvester. It was designed in a little town here locally. Berry harvest is such a small niche market that the farmers have to do a lot of their own fabricating & making do with altering mainstream machinery. Farming takes creativity ;).

The berry picker sits above the blackberry bushes which have been trained around wires. There are "beaters" (those hairbrush looking spokes) that shake the blackberry canes & any ripe berries drop off into a catcher near the bottom of the machine that ferries the berries up a conveyor belt of padded cups to the platform above.

A vent above the conveyor sucks up leaves & other little things that you wouldn't want to eat. There are 2-3 people picking out the undesirables from the berries as they pass on the conveyor belt & finally drop into crates. One person is constantly placing empty crates at the end of the conveyor to catch the berries, & another is taking the full crates to a pallet on the back of the platform.

After the pallets are full, they have to unload them. The back part of the platform can be lowered & they open the back gate & take off the full pallets of berries & replace them with empty ones. Then it's back out into the field for another few rounds.

This is all done at night to ensure that the blackberries are as firm & in the hardiest condition possible to be picked. It's easy for me to say this when my warm comfortable bed is promising a good night's rest, but there's something so magical about standing outside in the evening, just after dark, & being able to hear the hum of the pickers from our farm & the neighboring ones, & to see their lights just above the sea of blackberry canes, & hear the chatter of the night crew. There's just an energy & excitement & sense of "we're in this together". It makes me so content & happy to be where I am, & feel like I'm part of it all. The high schoolers & college kids that make up the night crew might argue that on the nights it's 40 degrees & raining:).

The work isn't fun, but it's a season everyone in the family helps out. They've all put their nights on the picker in. Some younger than others. (Dar says he was driving it as a 12-year-old!! Laws & regulations wouldn't allow that now, but they did what they had to then.) It can be really steep in spots, & with a three-wheeled, hefty machine, I make sure I pray for safety every night! God has been good to us so far.

No one's been hurt yet. Cousins from here & out of state come to help, making the work a little more bearable. I do feel a little sorry for the kids: it's summer, & they spend most of their day sleeping so they can work nights. But they're in it together, & when Dar talks about his memories with his cousins working on the berry farm, I'm really excited to think that perhaps my IL nephews maybe will be spending their teen summers living with their Oregon auntie, helping out on their berry farm...

It is such a family affair, more so than the blueberries. They rely on the kids to run the night crew. The working boys help out on their Saturdays off, & in the evenings, everyone is together, gearing up for a night of picking. We women keep the home fires burning & moral up by making treats to take out to the night crew & washing the helplessly stained berry clothes & maintaining the myriad of little things that have to be done while everyone else eats, sleeps, dreams berries. I rarely hear any other topic of conversation this time of year.

Talking is a big part of the harvest, too:). It's usually done in romeos (the work shoe of choice here), local fertilizer co-op hats, & hands in berry-stained jeans.

A night of blackberry picking can bring in 80,000 pounds of berries. 80,000 pounds. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the massive amounts of berries harvested. In the mornings, Dar & Tom have to drive in those thousands of pounds of fruit. Sometimes, Fee & I tag along.

The cannery is a crazy place of whizzing forklifts, lines of trucks, and pallets & pallets of berries. A lot of our blackberries go next door to the pie company I worked at before I had Fee. The berry processing plant used to be owned by the same people, & the berries still go into the Willamette Valley Pie Company's berries. (Love that! It just all fits together so nicely.) I recognize most of the farmer's now, & even know a lot of the varieties they grow. A blackberry isn't just a blackberry. There are marionberries, the queen of them all, the kotata, which we have, & obsidians, columbia stars, black diamonds, metolius.

Depending on your variety, quality, & the needs of the market, the berries will go into IQF (Individually Quick Frozen) packages or purees. Machine-picked berries aren't normally sold as fresh market berries because they do get a little damaged in the picking process. IQF is ideal, but these barrels are there for the berries that will be made into puree.

Pureed berries go into all your other berry products: jams, juices, canned goods. The IQF berries go through a nitrogen tunnel & are quick frozen (hence the name) & packaged up to be sold in smoothie blends & the like. The Willamette Valley Pie Co sells 2# & 5# bags of all kinds of berries! And pie:). It's pretty awesome to go in the store, see the bags of berries & rows of pies & know our berries are in there, bringing thousands of people berry-eating pleasure.

It is so busy this time of year. But we spend more time together as a family than ever. It's not always easy: Dar puts in looooong hours. It helps though, be see how much Fee enjoys the farm, & to be involved a little bit & to see very step of the process.