Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Picking Blueberries


A couple of weekends ago, again, we planned to go picking blueberries. This time, we did not want to take any chance for not knowing where to find some, so we went a bit further from where we live. Morten learned from his father that there were some places that have lots of blueberries in Kongsberg. His father lives there, it's about 45 minutes drive from our place.
We left home before noon. This time, Morten let me driving, driving a manual gear car! Uh..it's a bit scary. I drove automatic cars when I was in the US. I've been practicing driving a manual gear car several times here...in a parking lot of a shopping center after their closing time. But it's still scary. I am not used to the idea of shifting between gears. I still killed the engine the last time I drove, that was the last weekend. Anyway, driving to Kongsberg was not very difficult for me because driving on highways is easy, no need to stop, less chance of killing the engine. We drove into a small road and park there.
We found a place where there was lots of blueberries. Morten taught me how to use the picker. As I felt it was easier just pick directly with my fingers and we could not find our other picker, so I did it with a cup on my other hand and let Morten used to picker. Just looking at the sight of that mass of blueberries was already so exciting to me. I have never seen such sight before. They were much smaller and the color was stronger than those in the US. We gotta be careful or else it would be very difficult to get the stain off. I have been warned before, so I put on my least favorite clothes on. My socks were full of stain that I don't know how to wash it off.
After a little while, we moved deeper into the forest (it was not really a forest, though), and we found much much more blueberries. It was so exciting. I kept saying, "I am having fun...I'm having fun..."
Then, I tried to use the picker, oh, I got the hang of it...it was much easier and faster. Of course, that's why they designed the picker. Silly me...
I was too excited and too busy picking blueberries, and did not realize that we were not alone. There were only 4 or more people there, though. Some of them were picking mushrooms. Hmmm I would like to try to pick mushrooms, but Morten does not know which are edible and which are poisonous. So, we would need to go with somebody who understands this thing next time, maybe, I hope...
We've been picking for around 3 hours and our bucket was almost full. It's a 10 liters bucket! We got so much blueberries. We called it a day as we were already tired and hungry. But I was having so much fun!
Now, the boring thing came, cleaning them. It took me 3 days to clean them! Well, not all day, cause it would be too boring. We did not have a tool for cleaning them, so I needed to do it manually, one by one, 10 liters blueberries! Can you imagine it? I spent around 3-4 hours each day doing it. I made 1 liter of some kind of jam out of it. And the rest, Morten's sister's lent us some space in her freezer to keep them. Some kind of jam and borrowing some space in somebody's freezer, forgot to tell you that we haven't really settled in yet. We do not have a kitchen yet as we needed to remodel the kitchen after we bought this apartment. And we haven't bought most of the appliances we need yet. Gotta get the kitchen done first.
Anyway, we got another kind of berries, too. Another 10 liters. It's red currant berries. We picked them at Morten's sister's backyard. She does not like to pick berries, so rather than they got wasted, she offered us. It's much easier picking red currant berries, no tool needed, just use our fingers. And of course, much easier to clean also. We did not even need to clean them before freezing them. We could just use a fork to clean when they are frozen, we were told.
Hmm...which more berries can I pick next?

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