A Berry Picking Primer

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time during the summers picking berries. My parents have a house on a mountain called Blue Hills which was named for the multitudes of blueberries that grew there. We took day trips up the slopes of the ski runs at Mont Avila because there were even more blueberries there. We picked strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and of course blue berries which we learned to recognize by the little crowns. The other berries that were blue were poison, or so my brother told me and I was never brave enough to try for myself. Berry picking was a great way to keep us busy. We would get lost in the bush for hours, spurred on by the promise of pies if we brought back enough fruit. It was also a superb way of getting us to be quiet on long walks, as my mother had us convinced that if we were quiet enough we could hear the strawberries growing. Eventually we wised up, but not until my mother had got a lot of quiet mileage out of it. Somehow it never worked on my kids.

The best part was that I was the absolute best berry picker of all my friends and brothers. This was in part due to my being a ridiculously picky eater who could not stand eating berries. I just picked them. Because I was not spending half my time eating my stock, I picked a lot more. And because I did not eat half my stock, I came home with a lot of berries. I also had more time and patience to figure out how to find the best and the ripest berries, as well as the spots where there were the most berries in the bush. It also helps that I am short, significantly shorter than both my brothers, and therefore much better positioned to find the good berries which are only visible from under the bush.

I have not spent much time over the past few years contemplating berry picking. I still engage in it when visiting friends and family in the country, and of course in my strawberry patch which up to this year has been the only berry patch in my daily life. The past few weeks, however, now that I am spending up to two hours per week harvesting tomatoes I have been thinking about it quite a bit.

You may be wondering why I am thinking about berries while picking tomatoes. Tomatoes are, technically, a fruit. In fact, to quote my rabbi, the difference between wisdom and knowledge can be defined as follows: it takes knowledge to know that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom to know that it should not be added to a fruit salad. Not only is a tomato a fruit, but it has the same growth pattern as berries. The best and the ripest fruit are inevitably low and deep in the bush. They are also inevitably surrounded by biting insects. I have discovered this summer that the bigger the berry, the bigger the biting insect. Strawberries are swarming with some kind of noseums that leave tiny itchy bites. My tomatoes are swarming with large ravenous mosquitoes that always bite my upper arms just as I am reaching far into the most unreachable depths of the tomato jungle. I have no idea what the official definition of a berry is, but if it is a fruit that grows on a bush near the ground, it seems to me that the same principles apply.

I also realized that I am still better at finding and picking the good ones than anyone else in my family. I send out Josh or one of the kids to check for any ripe tomatoes and after they come out empty handed, I go out and find 25 ready to pick. So I decided to share my methodology.

The author of the book The Fruit Hunters, Adam Gollner, describes how humans are one of the rare species that can visually differentiate between green and red, a trait which is very beneficial when searching for ripe red fruits in a green jungle. He even suggests that stop for red and go on green relates to an instinct to keep going through the green leaves until you spot the red fruit and stop to eat. Although this does not explain our tastes for kiwis, bananas, green grapes and avocados, it is an interesting theory which I contemplated as I hunted in my tomato patch for the slightest hint of red. The theory is appealing, although I have no idea where he got it from. So the first key to berry picking is to duck low and look for red (or blue, or black as the case may be).

The second part of the technique is to lift up the branches and look underneath. The good stuff likes to hide in the leaves. Also, no matter how frequently you pick, there are always a few that stay hidden in some corner and eventually you find them perfectly ripe and ready to go just when you thought all the good ones were gone.

That is it. Go low, look for red, and lift the branches. It takes time and practice. It takes focus, concentration, and a meditative obsession which is why I love to clear my head after a long day of work and hide from my children under the shade of a jungle bush, and feel completely primitive. I have picked over one hundred tomatoes in the past three days. It really works.