Third Annual Blueberry Pickernic

It used to be, long ago, that we spent the Fourth of July making hay.  This is over thirty years ago, back when we used to make our own mulch. Dad and Lani baled thousands of bales every spring, starting in early May and ending in early July.  Most of the bales came from fields that were within four miles of the home farm, but on the Fourth of July we came out to Loudoun (I say "came" because that is where I am this morning) for a marathon day of raking and baling and loading.  In the week before, one of us would have been out here mowing these vast and bumpy and hilly fields, avoiding the groundhog holes.  The first pass around the outside perimeter of the field took about 45 minutes, and only after three or four circles did the time of each circuit start to go down.  I have no idea how many acres we would cut, but the hills made it impossible to see from one end of the field to the other.

The biggest group we could muster on a holiday, maybe ten or twelve of us, came out in trucks with trailers in the hottest part of the day.  The person driving the tractor with the baler, usually Dad, was off on the horizon, following my wiggly windrows.  All of this can only happen when it is dry and hot. The air doesn't have to be dry (and never is) but the grass must be dry or the bales weigh twice as much and will get moldy if stored.  When we arrived at the field, the outside four or five rows of bales were ready, and we began to make our way  around, picking up the bales and loading them on the dump truck and trailer.  One driver, one or two on the truck and trailer to stack, and the rest of the crew walking from bale to bale, picking them up and carrying them to the vehicles. The first few layers were easy, but as the stacks grew, the people on the ground had to throw them higher and higher to the stackers who teetered above.

The day I remember most clearly, we picked up and loaded over a thousand bales.  The dump truck could hold about 150 bales, stacked seven layers high, and the trailer held another 125.  A pickup truck, loaded ambitiously, held about 50 bales. So this was a lot of loads on a blazing hot day.  We finished just at dark and started the long trip home, back toward civilization, east on Route 7.  The caravan drove slowly (we never tied the loads down in those days).  The whole way home, there were fireworks displays showering and booming on all sides.  

Nowadays, we don't work that hard on the Fourth of July.  We still do whatever needs to be done -- go to markets, pick for the next day, keep the stand going -- but we don't try to do anything hard.  We have a party at the end of the day.

This tradition is well over 30 years old, but it was not our tradition until just three years ago when Jon and I bought Timothy's blueberry patch, along with ten acres that he had bought from my parents in the 1970s.  Timothy planted about 100 bushes in 8 rows and he tended them with the love of a hobby farmer.  He never sold the berries, he just let friends pick them and he had a big Blue-B-Q every year around July 4.  He and Claudine had lots of friends and acquaintances, and those people brought all their cousins and bosses and ex-wives -- their Blue-B-Q became the social event of the season, with 200 guests.

Jon and I are not really that big on parties.  But we wanted to preserve some part of the tradition, so we renamed the event, using a word that my father made up -- pickernic.  It might have a "k" at the end, who knows. A pickernic is a picnic for people who are pickers, not for city people, so to speak.  So it is kind of a company party, in our case.  We invited all of the farmers who live and work on the 400 acres that were originally purchased by the Newcomb-Planck-Moutoux-Graybeal group, and we invited a few other select non-farmers.  The first year, more people came than we invited, because old traditions are hard to stop.  But this year it was just the right number and just the right mix. Plenty of berries for all, plenty of time for good conversations.

It was a rainy, cloudy, unpredictable day so we decided to move the picnic portion indoors to the new barn with the coolers and wash sinks.  Kind of like a reception at Arena Stage -- they just have parties in the hallways between the theaters.  As it happened, it wasn't really raining when it came time to eat, but a level floor and chairs and tables and a roof is not the worst thing for a gathering of 45.  Jon stood at the grill and cranked out piles of barbecue chicken and boiled corn in the big pot that Hall Kern gave us.  The food table was filled with salads and pies and macaroni and cheese -- so much food. Farmers are good eaters, and good providers. 

At the end, there were fireworks to the east and north.  We could see the top third of about six different displays, and we could hear many more to the south.  

I don't miss the days of making hay, but I am glad we have them to compare to these days, so we can have some perspective on how hard we are working.  We still work, but we don't work to the very end of our stamina.  We save some time and energy for other things, like eating and talking with people we really like.