Music and Cats

When my parents visit us in Seattle each summer, we joke that we’ll eat like bears while they’re here. We’re referring to the wild Pacific salmon (king, coho, silver) and luscious local berries (take your pick of straw, rasp, blue, boysen, tay, marion; the list goes on) that are in season this time of year, which we imagine would constitute a large part of the diet of any bear that might suddenly find itself in our neck of the woods. (Walk a block from our house, and you’ll find 75 feet of blackberry brambles, heavy with ripe fruit, threatening to take over the alley. Stand at the Ballard Locks, looking down into the water at the entrance to the fish ladder; the salmon teem, silver and red, just below the water’s surface. Save for the human problem, a bear could do worse than to land in our neighborhood.)

As I have become interested in the old-fashioned art of preserving the summer’s bounty, I’ve also become much more interested in exactly where, how, and by whom our food is grown. Since our young nephews now come to visit us in the summer, we’re introducing them to small local farms, and giving them the opportunity, rare for city kids, to pick what they eat themselves, straight from the plants. Last year we picked apples; this year, blueberries.

Last week, my parents, sister, nephews and I went to the blueberry farm on Mercer Slough, one of the wetlands around Lake Washington. This farm has been in existence since the 1940’s, and now does a large business in u-pick berries. Armed with a couple of white plastic buckets, we followed the truck track along the ends of the rows of bushes, until we saw plants covered with silver-bloomed blue fruit.

When ripe, blueberries almost fall from the bush, making them very easy to pick. (The machines used to harvest some blueberries gently shake the bushes, collecting the ripe berries that fall from the plants.) Blueberries are sized for little hands, and are well suited to the “one-in-the-bucket / one-in-the-mouth” harvesting strategy favored by many children (of whatever age).

After wandering away from my family to harvest a particularly laden bush, I walked back down a row of bushes to find that my sister and Boo were doing a fine imitation of eating like bears. Boo wanted to be carried, and Melanie had obliged… and they had given up all pretense of putting berries into a bucket. The blueberries they plucked warm from the bushes went straight into their mouths. And look what happy bears they were! (No, Boo’s not missing a tooth here; he just has part of a berry stuck on it.)

We paid an amazing $1 per pound for the 5 1/2 pounds of blueberries that made it into our buckets; I don’t know what the price per pound would have been had it included the berries that left the farm in our stomachs. We had blueberries with lunch, and blueberries for dessert that night. The next day, some of the berries went at least part of the way to Texas on an airplane for little boy’s snacks. Paul and I nibbled on blueberries during the week, but tonight, almost a week after the farm trip, I found that we still had 2 1/2 pounds of beautiful blueberries in the refrigerator. It was time for some preserving… even if it was already 9 p.m.

To be continued…

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