Blueberries

The other night when Jon and I spent the night in Loudoun, we spontaneously did something momentous.  Meaning, we didn't have a plan but we ended up finishing a task that we have been intending to finish for years.

First Jon made dinner on the grill (up until recently we have only ever had the usual charcoal grill, but last year Jim gave us a gas grill he found or someone gave him that was a little bit broken, perfect for our Wheatland abode).  We had decided we would just find our dinner out there since it is so much packing to bring breakfast and lunch and dinner and breakfast.  I got some of Casey's pork out of the freezer at the stand, took a few cucumbers that Ellen had picked from her carefully tended plants in the hoop house, we ate some leftovers from various previous meals, and it was a fine meal.  As happens so often, Jon cooked while I just collapsed on the hammock.  Once I stop working, I am basically useless.

And then it was about 7:15, the sun was finally not so high and hot, and we thought we would go and see about putting a few lines of orchard tape (durable drip lines) in the blueberries.  Last year before the wedding Jon and Stephen had finally buried a water line to the blueberry patch, but we had never used the water yet.  Jon stood at the northern edge of the patch, feeding me an unkinked supply of plastic tubing, and I crawled under the bushes (branches already being pulled to the ground with fruit) and wiggled the pipe in and out of the bottoms of the plants. It was like a military exercise, wriggling on the ground pulling a line behind me.  A little pokey and scratchy and really sweaty. 

The point of this was to learn how to do it so I could tell someone else to finish the job.  But after three rows of practice, there were only five rows left. I told Jon to time me on the next row and it turned out it only took three minutes to belly crawl to the end. I was already so sweaty, might as well keep going.  We finished laying out the lines and it was just about dark.

I said, too bad it's already dark, guess we can't finish this tonight.  I am going to take a shower.  Jon said, I have a flashlight.  So he hooked up all the lines to the manifold while I went to wash off all the poison ivy and pokey stuff. When I got back he was just turning on the water.

I wrote to Timothy to tell him that the blueberries finally had water, after all these years.  He had tended the bushes for about 30 years or more before we inherited them along with our purchase of the ten acres.  He responded by saying that many years ago he had pumped water from the creek in the woods, laying out pipe and hooking up a gas pump at the bottom of a steep hill.  He said that the pump carcass is probably still in the creek, and that he only succeeded in watering the blueberries for a season or two before all the parts got too mouse-eaten. He said: the pump conveys. 

The conventional wisdom is that blueberries need a lot of water. I cannot imagine what this patch would be like if it ever actually GOT a lot of water.  Even though it is now about 35 years old, it is still producing massive quantities of berries.  Timothy never kept any yield records and I imagine they are only a fraction of their past production.  Some day we will plant the next section, just to the west, that Casey prepared for new bushes last year.

Now that there is finally water to the blueberries, we can plant new ones and they will grow.  Next stop on the water line is the cabin so we can wash dishes and brush our teeth in running water.  The blueberries came first, but we are next in line.