When the blueberries come in, we load everybody up and head out to the local farm. In theory, we go to pick blueberries. In practice, we go to pick some blueberries, eat a scandalous number of others, blow a few dandelions, and come home sun-tired with purple-stained fingers and buckets that weigh less than they should.

Everybody picks different

Put a family in a row of blueberry bushes and you’ll learn something about each of them. Some of us are systematic — one cup at a time, steady as a metronome. Some of us work the high branches where the fattest berries hide. And some of us believe deeply in quality control, one berry for the bucket, two for the picker.

The littlest crew members contribute in their own way. There’s helping. There’s supervising. And there’s discovering that a blueberry farm also grows a truly excellent crop of dandelions.

Bucket duty

Once the buckets start filling, somebody appoints themselves guard. The post is taken seriously. The guard is also, historically, the same person eating out of the buckets — but you can’t fire family.

What the haul becomes

The berries that survive the ride home have a good life ahead of them. Some get eaten by the handful straight out of the colander. A good stretch of them get jarred into our homemade blueberry syrup, which is the whole reason we pick more than any reasonable family should. And the rest go into the freezer, where they wait patiently to become cobbler.

If you’ve got a u-pick farm anywhere near you, go. It’s a morning of free-range children, an afternoon of purple tongues, and a freezer full of proof that summer happened.