What's Bluer Than a Smurf?

The Queen frolicked through blueberry bushes this afternoon and filled her borrowed bucket with tasty, plump blueberries from the local U-Pick farm. To the outside observer, perhaps it appeared that the Queen took a leisurely stroll through the bushes, perspiring in a most feminine way, while battling demon beetles, devil wasps, poisonous caterpillars and honey bees... this would also be true.

Blueberry bushes are fairly obliging. No thorns to damage my fragile skin. The berries practically fall off the vine when ripe. And they are so damn tasty. But it is naive to think it is a simple thing to fill a bucket with berries... it is not. It takes a lot of blueberries, and one must dig around for them as they do not all ripen at the same time, nor do they ripen in the most convenient of places within the bush.

They are really quite beautiful though. You can sort of work your way into the bush, as you listen to the quiet humming of the bees. Occasionally you will see a honey bee, a yellow jacket or one of those horrible beetles that sound like a single engine prop airplane as they buzz you. The Queen is very aware of where her hands are going, and if you go blueberry picking I advise you to be as well. So the Queen avoided any conflicts and escaped with her royal life.

Today was a good day.

Sometimes you lose a berry, there's nothing for it but to persevere and try to do better next time. If you look on the ground you can find a good deal of salvageable blueberries that have dropped. At first you go by feel, but eventually you can discern by sight which are viable and which have been down there for a while, they're mushy and have no sheen to them... you want to avoid the mushy ones, trust the Queen on this.

This doesn't mean that I suggest you forage on the ground a good deal, it's better to stick to the bushes, but the Queen saw where her berries dropped and was able to retrieve them so her hard work did not go to waste.

Don't forget to look up high and down low, and inside the foliage. Most people go for the easy berries, so the really plump ones are deep within the foliage and take a little more work. But it's worth it... so worth it. And it's really not hard to get to them.

This is not the hand of the Queen, but I forgot to photograph my bucket...

So the Queen originally set out to help out the farmer and pick a few buckets of blueberries for $5/ea and come home with the money. But in amongst all the deliciousness, I changed my mind. I came home with over three quarts of blueberries, most of which are now in the freezer. For $13 you can't beat the price and the quiet reflective time you spent picking your own blueberries. They taste so much better than what you find in the store (i.e. they actually taste like blueberries).

You can see that they were already sweating by the time I got them home, so it was best to get them put up right away. I am looking forward to eating them as-is or using them in blueberry cobbler. The royal dogs also appreciate blueberries and were happy to snarf down a handful when I arrived home.

And there are exciting things happening in the kingdom!

A neighbor needed a place to grow tobacco, and we have a field that was overgrown with weeds, blackberry bushes that we couldn't get to, and bramble. I never took a measuring stick to it, but I guesstimate it was about four feet high and a breeding ground for spiders of enormous size. *shiver*

So the neighbor brought his tractor over and bushhogged the field. I forgot what it looked like long ago, the gently sloping hill, shorn of weeds.

An open path to the woods.

In the process he unearthed a rat snake about five feet long. Our neighbor is a very nice man. He tilled the ground and saw this snake so he stopped the tractor, got down from the driver's seat and rescued the snake by poking a stick around in the mound of dirt until he found it, creating a point of egress which the snake eagerly took advantage of. I might have done a similar thing... For instance, I too would have stopped the tractor... but this is where we part ways... I would remain in the driver's seat to observe where the snake went before moving on.

The snake really didn't want to have anything to do with us. He slithered away from us as fast as he could manage... he must not know how important I am.

Cutting into the field with the tractor.

Boy tobacco sure grows fast! I went to bed with an empty field and woke up to this:

Little sproutlings of tobacco that had been transplanted by magic.

They need rain... but not too much rain because that's how we ended up with tobacco in our field in the first place, his other field was deluged with too much rain and they died. Rest in peace little plantlings, rest in peace.

It's not much to look at now...

But soon these pathetic creatures will look like this. Except for the really nice tobacco barn. Though if that is a side effect of planting tobacco I'm all for it.

As the Queen loves to take pictures, this is Queen Anne's Lace, or wild carrot, and yes, they say the roots are edible if you get them young. Some say it looks similar to poison hemlock, but I don't think so. These flowers fly solo while hemlock has a head with multiple clusters on it. The most telling difference is the stalk, if it's hairy, it is not hemlock. (the Queen does her research)

These however, are poisonous. To humans at least. Birds seem to enjoy them. They are pokeberries. As I understand it, the young leaves can be used in salad or cooked like a green, but I don't know enough about that to dabble. I just leave them alone and the birds enjoy having berries to eat and a place to perch.

Like this ruby throated hummer perched on the remnants of last year's bush. Cute little fella.

I never knew hummingbirds perched until we moved to the castle. Sometimes he likes to perch in the rain and fluff out his feathers to give himself a bath.

'Tis time for the Queen to replenish the royal bird feeders and water the kingdom's plants. And since no one takes out the royal trash I must do that as well... it takes a lot to run a kingdom.