Blueberries are a healthy refreshment with many vitamins in the midsummer heat. For an optimal taste experience, however, they should only be picked when they are fully ripe, as they do not ripen afterwards.

The right time for forest walks

If it gets too hot in your own garden in midsummer, you can kill two birds with one stone with a refreshing walk in the forest. From around the beginning of July, the small and particularly aromatic fruits of the forest blueberries ripen in the clearings of moor forests and on some slopes. Their harvest time is usually a little shorter than that of cultivated blueberries, as they only reach a low bush height with very few fruits per plant. At higher altitudes, however, wild blueberries can sometimes still be collected in August. With all berries collected in the forest, it is important not to eat the unwashed fruit directly in the forest. As tempting as the fruits may be as a refreshment, protect yourself from the dangerous fox tapeworm by washing them extensively or by preserving them.

Identify fully ripe fruit at a glance

On the bushes of the North American cultivated blueberry, which can be up to 2.5 meters high, the fruits ripen with a delay of about two months from the beginning of July. As with raspberries, fully ripe and very unripe fruits can hang next to each other. You can recognize the ripe blueberries by their dark blue color and their plump shape. When picking, they can be easily torn from the bushes with gentle pressure with two fingers. In contrast to the harvest of forest blueberries, squeezing individual fruits is less serious with cultivated blueberries, since their flesh and juice are not blue and therefore fingers and hands do not turn blue.

Accelerate and facilitate harvesting

If you have very large quantities of blueberries to harvest, it may be advisable to purchase a so-called blueberry comb. This is a box-shaped harvesting device consisting of a front part with metal tines arranged in a comb and a collection container. It allows multiple berries to be stripped from a branch without tearing off the leaves. However, this requires some practice, because otherwise the unripe berries, which are often arranged very close to the ripe fruits, will also be torn off. Larger quantities of blueberries can be processed into various delicacies such as the following:

  • Cake with blueberries
  • jam
  • fruit juice
  • dried blueberries
  • frozen berry mixtures for sundaes and desserts

tips and tricks

If you cannot eat or preserve blueberries straight away, it is better to leave them hanging on the bush. They usually keep better hanging on the plants than in the refrigerator or at room temperature.

Category:

Vegetable garden