Our farm experienced approximatley 15 minutes of hail on May 8, 2024. Our promising blueberry and paw paw crops were knocked off or banged up on the plants. In either case we will not have any blueberries or paw paws to sell this year. Hopefully, we will have some honey to sell later this summer. We pray that you and your families have a blessed summer.

Our largest berries are on varieties that ripen first.

If you are interested in finding out about becoming a U-Pick customer e-mail us at berries@hartapiaries.com with "blueberries" in the subject line for more information. We are listing our address in this fashion to slowdown the spam. Watch this site for more details in the coming days.

We supply lined plastic buckets to pick berries into. When your bucket is about 1/2 full we recommend that you take the bag of berries out and we will give you a new bag. The bags are yours to take your berries home in and by stopping the picking volume at this point berries are not normally crushed by the weight of the berries above them. We do recommend that you bring a cooler to take your bags of blueberries home in because this will help extend the shelf life of the berries. We recommend that pickers come early in the morning when the berries are still cool and the field is not so hot. Bring a hat to provide some shade for your head.

If you are not sure what you can do with blueberries you may want to take a look at Pickyourown.com. They have some ideas like making blueberry jam, freezing blueberries and a blueberry pie.

Customers often ask if our berries are organic. We tried to be organic but our experience has been that the bushes do not grow well without commercial fertilizer so we have used commercial fertilizer. We do not spray any pesticides or herbicides on our farm. We are looking for organic ways to deal with a newer pest in our area - the Japanese beetle.

These two images are from the patch. These are Duke blueberries and they are our earliest ripening variety.

History:

We added blueberries to our farm in 2005.

Flowers

These are some images of the blueberry bushes flowering. We have many bumblebees, honeybees, and many other types of insects in the patch at that time.

Mulching the patch

Keeping the patch mulched to control grass and weeds is an ongoing battle. You can see a vintage picture of one of our helpers making use of a sawdust pile while we were taking a break. That helper is now in college.