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The particularly aromatic fruits on wild blueberry bushes are often referred to as the caviar of the forest. Whether you're collecting them in the forest or picking them in the garden, blueberries taste delicious fresh or cooked.
The best harvest time for blueberries
With favorable weather conditions, the blueberry picking season begins around the beginning of July. Since the fruits on the bushes do not all ripen at the same time, but only ripen gradually, the delicious fruits can sometimes be harvested well into September. When picking the fruits, you should make sure that you only remove really blue and fully ripe fruits from the branches, as blueberries do not ripen after harvesting.
Harvest aids
Whether in the forest or with the blueberries in the garden, you should have the following things ready for the harvest if possible:
- one or more bowls
- a cloth for cleaning blueberry juice from your fingers
- a blueberry comb for faster harvesting
A blueberry comb consists of many wire tines arranged in parallel and a collecting container. You can use it to scrape through the branches of the blueberries so that ripe berries are scraped off into the catch tray. However, with this method, unripe fruits are also caught, so that a visual inspection must be carried out in the same way as when picking the berries by hand.
Transport and process correctly
Blueberries do not keep very long after harvest, especially when they are bruised. They therefore always wanted to use bowls for the blueberry harvest that they did not fill to the brim. The fewer blueberries there are on top of each other in the bowl, the less damage there is to the sensitive fruit. Before each consumption, blueberries from the forest should be washed thoroughly or boiled during further processing in order to avoid danger from the fox tapeworm. Blueberries can be used in the kitchen to make jam, compote and cakes.
tips and tricks
So that enough fruit can be harvested from cultivated blueberries for up to 30 years, you should cut the blueberry bushes regularly. Remove the older twigs that can be identified by the bark, because blueberries only produce many flowers on young twigs.