Blueberry Picking

Today was a beautiful (though hot) day; we spent much of the afternoon berry- and peach-picking, which we had been planning to do for awhile now. We were going to pick apples too, but since we're going out of town pretty soon and don't want a lot of fruit sitting around rotting in our house while we're gone, we thought we should save the apple-picking for later this summer. We have plenty of fruit anyway between the 6.5 lbs of blueberries and 7 lbs of peaches that we picked today!

With food prices getting so steep at the grocery store, picking your own fruit seems like an even better deal these days, even if it does require some hard labor (but that's the fun part of it, right?) :) Blueberry-picking is definitely labor-intensive, which explains why they're so expensive in the store. Once many of the lower ones on the bush are picked (which was the case when we went today), it's a lot harder since you have to reach to the top branches and pull them down. But, we got quite a few nice, plump berries out of it, which will be good for smoothies, cobbler, pancakes, and whatever else we put them in.

There were quite a few dragonflies flying around during our picking, and Ben got several great close-up pictures, like this one:

It began raining just before we picked peaches, so we didn't get pictures of that, and we had to pick them rather hurriedly anyway since we were getting wet.

Next weekend we head to California to the Eastern Sierras for vacation (Yosemite area). We cannot wait! I'm sure we'll have many pictures from that when we return. Until then, hope everyone is having a good summer.