Blueberry Picking

It’s u-pick blueberry season in Florida!

There must be half a dozen u-pick blueberry farms within 20 minutes of Titusville, but I know there are hundreds through the rest of Florida. My brother and sister-in-law discovered Holland Family Blueberry Farm last year and have been stalking their Facebook page waiting for them to reopen for the season. They reopened last weekend and we decided to make a family outing there this morning.

Holland Family Farm is a small blueberry farm that’s run privately by the Holland family in Mims. It’s a small hidden place off of US-1 that you may miss if you weren’t looking for it. We parked and headed to the tent to collect our buckets for picking. Each bucket holds approximately 5lbs of blueberries and blueberries are $3 per pound.

The rows of berries are labeled by colored markers. The blue means the row of blueberries are sweeter while the other colors reflect different levels of tartness.

My friend Rachel joined us as well.

It’s early in the season, so you had to dig for the riper blueberries. There were still plenty on the branches and we had no problems filling our buckets.

Check out the size of those berries!

We spent about and hour or two in the fields picking berries. It was almost soothing going through each bush and finding the bright blueberries to pick. I filled up about 1/2 my bucket and spent $8 on 2+ pound of blueberries. Not bad if you ask me.

We couldn’t wait to turn the berries into something amazing as soon as we got home.

The farm was handing out a recipe for a blueberry pie that a customer had left for them. They said it was good, so we decided to give it a shot. My dad even made a pie crust from scratch for the occasion.

The blueberry pie recipe was pretty basic:

• 1 baked pie crust
• 4 cups blueberries
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 3 T corn starch
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• pinch of salt
• 1 tsp butter

Cook 2 cups blueberries, sugar, salt, corn starch, and water until berries have melted down. Remove from stove and add lemon juice and butter. Cool to just medium warm and add 2 cups fresh blueberries. Pour into pie crust. Chill well.

I had my piece with cool whip.

The pie was good. It wasn’t terribly sweet and had just the right amount of tartness to it. I think it was hit, there’s not even a crumb of it left!

After blueberry picking we headed to the Rocketman expo and waited in the longest line I’ve EVER waited in at a race before.

It took us 45 minutes to get to the registration table. INSANE.

Once we got our bibs, we headed to the bike racks to rack our bikes overnight. I can’t say I’ve ever racked my bike in a bank parking lot before. Hey, at least I won’t have to worry about dirt or sand. 😉

It was raining so my brother helped me cover the good ole B16. We need to keep her fresh for the morning!

Kind of jealous of all the bike covers we saw. Maybe it’s time to invest?

The swim tomorrow takes place in the Indian River. It was fun listening to all the tourists talk about the water. (By the way there’s a CRAZY amount of tourists in town for this race! Titusville needs this desperately, I hope they all filled the restaurants this weekend.) Anyway, the river is ridiculously shallow. We used to take boats out as a kid and whenever we fell off of the kneeboard or water skies we would simply stand up. You could basically wade from one side of the river to the over and always be able to touch ground. I think that surprised a lot of the out-of-town athletes – they’re not used to being able to stand up in the middle of a river.

Ben and I are pumped and ready for race day! It’s going to be a fun one!

Good night!!!