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We are excited to bring you blackberries in the shares this week! The first variety of the season to ripen is called Natchez - it is one of the larger varieties, sweet and fabulous for eating fresh.
As exciting as the blackberries are, you should definitely eat your raspberries as soon as possible. The wet weather enables mold to grow much quicker - we are doing our best to give you the best quality fruit we have but it would be best to enjoy (or freeze) your raspberries day-of or morning-after share pickup. Being a low spray farm means that we aren't applying a fungicide every day and a lot of B-grade fruit (fine except for a speck of mold) is getting picked into buckets (for Hardywood Brewery's Raspberry Stout).
The strawberries are waning, we've finished harvesting a few of the five varieties we planted last fall. We'll still have some available for the next few weeks, but we're unsure of how much longer we'll have enough for all the shares.
The blueberries this week from the Moores in Invanhoe NC don't have as many nickel-sized berries as earlier, they are still delightfully flavorful.
We may have had our last harvest of sweet cherries, the amount of rain we received may have caused the remaining fruits to crack on the trees, we are waiting to hear back from the Chiles family of Crown Orchard in Crozet, but we do still have some of last week's harvest available to purchase as extras. The dark ones have been pretty firm and delicious.
Our berry model this week is a new harvester, Evelyn! We met her at West End Farmer's Market a couple weeks ago, and since her private school is already out for the summer she has been picking berries with us! We are very grateful for the young people (and those of all ages) who have joined our team this season already but we are ALWAYS accepting applications via Agriberry.com/hiring
Eat more berries!
