Blueberry Basics

Blueberries are about the best all around fruit you can choose for yourself or family. They excel in Vitamin C and have recently been promoted for their contribution to healthy eye sight. One cup will provide 0% saturated fats, 0% cholesterol, and 0% sodium. It will provide 100 nutritious calories, 14% of your daily fiber, and, of course 11 tasty grams of natural sugar.

They are cultivated as "high bush" blueberries in the Willamette Valley. The many varieties bring different date-of-ripening, sweetness, subtleties of flavor, color, size, and hardiness-after-picking.

The plants require annual careful pruning, disease control, fertilization and other soil adjustments to bring out their best characteristics. At harvest, it's often a question of who picks more, people or birds!!

Blueberries "freeze" very well as a method of preservation. They should be frozen unwashed...particularly well suited to the Beach Family Farm operation as we do not spray our plants with any pesticides. Best practice is spreading them on a cookie tray overnight in your freezer. Then pop them into your mouth like candy!

In the free recipe brochures we supply, you will find many opportunities to enjoy!! A really good 9" pie takes about 3 pounds of berries; a frozen daiquiri after a tough day of picking in the summer sun, perhaps a couple less. Best way to make pancakes is using about half the berries heated up in a sugar solution as syrup, with the second half chopped up with an electric mixer and folded into the batter...delightful color, and a lot less problems sticking to the pan!

Well, we're looking forward to meeting you this coming summer...come on out!!