Blueberries

U- Pick Blueberry Patch!

As 2009 is winding down it has been a good year. We had enough berries to supply the contracts for our prepurchasing customers and then some. If you are not a prepurchasing customer we are anticipating enough berries for other customers in 2010. If you would like to be notified when the patch opens we will be happy to send you an email. Please send us an email to the address below with "mailing list" in the subject line and we will add you to our email list.

These two images are from the patch on June 13, 2008. These are Duke blueberries and they are our earliest ripening variety.

History:

We added blueberries to our farm in 2005. We planned to sell the blueberries in a U-pick fashion with a twist. Since blueberries are in short supply in our area we initially offered customers a chance to "buy-in" to our blueberry farm. Those "prepurchasing" customers received a discounted price and a selected section of the patch to pick the amount of berries pre-purchased. Each of those customers pays us each year for a certain amount of blueberries for the 5 years of the contract. The catch is they get to pick that amount of blueberries when the patch comes into production. We planted 430 blueberry bushes in 2005 and had a few berries in 2006. Things were looking very good in 2007 as the patch was full of white blossoms. However, the weather changed and we had two nights of 17 degree F temperatures which destroy the entire blueberry crop and even killed a couple of our peach trees. 2008 turned out to be a very good year for our patch. We were spared hail that destroyed the entire crop of another blueberry patch only 12 miles away. We had enough blueberries for all of our prepurchasing customers and more for others who happened to stop by. The 2009 crop was also very good. The patch produced about 125% of what it produced in 2008. We are hopeful that 2010 will also produce a nice crop. Hope to see you and your family at the patch next season.

If you are interested in finding out about becoming a U-pick customer e-mail us at bees1 at (replace the at with the @ symbol) hartapiaries dot (replace the dot with ".") com with "blueberries" in the subject line for more information. We are listing our address in this fashion to slowdown the spam. Watch this site for more details in the coming days.

Flowers

This bush and many of the others flowered this spring. We have many fruit blossoms and we hope they will over winter well.

Mulching the patch

We have been working hard to get the patch mulched and control weeds. You can see one of our helpers making use of a sawdust pile while we were taking a break.