There are so many blueberries on the Shawangunk mountains. There's even a place deep in the woods with blueberry trees! Really, you have to reach up to get them (and get mosquito bites in your armpits). Way back when, there were squatters up there who came just for the blueberry season. Some of their shacks are still there.

In Saugerties they were selling the first local peaches this weekend! I picked some up on the way to the Grey Fox bluegrass festival in Columbia County.

Austerlitz is having its blueberry festival a week from Sunday. Ellenville's, in the Shawangunks, is on August 27.

Got up there again yesterday afternoon around 5. On a hot afternoon I had the whole place to myself. I had brought along a folding stool and sat in the shade of the bushes, picking about a pint at a time. The bushes were loaded and the heat had made the berries extra sweet. I ate and picked and picked and ate and had moved about 12 feet along one row by the time I had my pail filled. Price is about a third to a quarter of those in the local market and the berries so much better. They keep in the fridge for about a week but I usually go back every four or five days and freeze any left overs. It's a huge blueberry field - a far cry from my childhood when I took a pail up the hill and spent hours filling it. Those wild bushes were browsed off by deer so we don't have wild berries any more.

There's a blueberry festival in Austerlitz this weekend. Our bushes have petered out at the house. I'm back to buying.

Oldroser, is that Greig's Farm? Do they use chemicals on the blueberries? just curious. I picked raspberries there for the first time last year, and froze them. They should've weighed me before going in because I came out pounds heavier! It is SO relaxing to pick berries with no one around. Must be the gatherer instinct that feels so good.

I just picked berries at Greig's farm. They do use herbicides to kill the poison ivy, pesticides to kill the bugs, and fungicides to kill the mold. If these products kill all these living things, what are they doing to us??? Killing and mutating our cells...cancer...

I have all these berries now, froze some, ate some, made a pie. I know too much. Gotta get back to hiking in the Shawangunks and collecting nature's organics. I used to get quartsful. I already had cancer. 50% of the population will get it in their lives.

Sorry for the rant. It gets to me sometimes, what this world is coming to.

A couple of years ago Greig didn't spray the blueberries and every single one had a worm in it - they closed two weeks after they opened.
I've been eating a lot of Greig's berries over the years and am still healthy - in fact, I think that's why I have no signs of macular degeneration in spite of my age. Don't know what they use for spray but assume it is an approved product
Now in Maine, where wild blueberries are the biggest crop they grow, they spray the hillsides from an airplane. Japan happily imports most of their crop - in spite of making such a fuss about our apples.
Years ago my older nephew went with his mother and me to pick blueberries in NJ - sniffed when he got out of the car, told us to wait in the car and went over to talk to the owner of the place. Came back looking kind of green and told us to forget it - they were spraying with dieldrin! Dan is an environmental chemist and he spotted the familiar smell right off the bat. Needless to say, we took our business elsewhere!