Berries on Foster Hill Road
384 Foster Hill Road, Calais
With one extraordinary jammer and several gardeners at the office, it's not unusual to find a bowl of blueberries or raspberries on the your desk, and receiving a surplus summer squash on your keyboard is to be expected at some point in August. After a rainy spring and a late start for many crops, Vermonters are enjoying an excellent harvest. Now in the third week of blueberry season in Central Vermont, it would be easy to forget that blueberries are not available in the yard every day of the year.
Berries on Foster Hill Road
At Heney Realtors, Jane Eakin is the Queen of Blueberry Season. (There's a separate title and prestige awarded to the Jam Champion.) She generously invites friends to pick from her 1,200-bush blueberry patch in Calais for a suggested donation of $2/pint. Even after a weekend of heavy traffic, there is still plenty of fruit on the bushes. I've had the chance to visit the property three times and each round, I leave dreaming about this house: an impeccable cape on the hill above Number 10 Pond with no shortage of barns and woods to explore.
On Sunday, our family headed out to Calais with a pie in mind and ran into Ray Mikus with his crew. Central Vermont is a patchwork of small towns and that these encounters are part of the landscape.
Thanks again to Jane for her contribution to our daily berry intake. We certainly brought enough fruit home to set up a blueberry pie test kitchen.