When we first moved here, I planted two blueberry plants. (You have to have at least two different species planted near each other for either of the plants to produce berries.) Since then, I’ve planted about one each year, so now we have about a dozen bushes of varying sizes planted around the pool patio. The first couple of years, we only got a handful or two of blueberries each season. This year, we’ve already picked about five gallons, and the hardworking little bushes are still loaded with green berries that will take weeks to ripen.
I’m gonna go out on a limb (or a blueberry branch) and estimate that we’ll get about ten gallons by the end of the season. Even though this year, my blueberry bushes have been deviled by stink bugs. They gang up on the same branch and suck the juices out of that cluster of berries. We don’t use bug sprays or chemicals on our plants, but I’ve perfected the art of positioning a glass jar under the bad bugs and then slamming the lid down to trap them in the jar. A few blueberries get sacrificed too, but they were already a loss. Then I dump the stink bugs into the chicken coop, and the mama chickens have a wonderful time eating blueberries and teaching their babies how to catch and eat bugs.
Judge me if you want, but IMHO it’s the circle of life and all that shit. Yes, I am an animal communicator and I try to honor and respect all life forms. But hardworking blueberry bushes and chickens (who happily give us the eggs they don’t want to incubate) are life forms that I appreciate. Freeloading stink bugs, not so much. Yes, they are a part of the food chain for wild birds. But the birds around here are kept quite busy controlling the deer fly population, and they know where to find stinkbugs if they’d like to add a little stink to their diet.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a win-win for everyone, even for the deer flies and the stink bugs, who may decide to come back in their next lifetime as a more evolved (and possibly less annoying) life form.
And yet, I digress. I meant to extoll the virtues of blueberries and instead I got caught up in a smackdown about stink bugs. Let me summarize and move on:
Blueberries are great.
Stink bugs are not great.
That is all.
Please enjoy this short video clip of Jed picking his own blueberries when I wasn’t harvesting and sharing fast enough.
