Blueberries are a he althy refreshment with lots of vitamins in the heat of summer. For an optimal taste experience, they should only be picked when fully ripe, as they do not ripen.
When are blueberries ripe and how do I recognize them?
Blueberries are ripe when they are dark blue in color and plump in shape. They can be easily torn off the bushes with gentle pressure. The harvest time begins at the beginning of July and lasts about two months for cultivated blueberries, but is shorter for wild blueberries.
The right time for forest walks
If it gets too hot in your own garden in midsummer, you can kill two birds with one stone with a refreshing walk in the forest. From around the beginning of July, the small and particularly aromatic fruits of wild blueberries ripen in the clearings of moor forests and on some slopes. Their harvest time is usually slightly shorter than that of cultivated blueberries because they only reach a low bush height with very few fruits per plant. At higher altitudes, wild blueberries can sometimes still be collected in August. With all berries collected in the forest, it is important not to eat the picked fruits directly in the forest without washing them. As tempting as the fruit may be as a refreshment, you can protect yourself from the dangerous fox tapeworm by washing or preserving it extensively.
Identify fully ripe fruits at a glance
On the North American blueberry bushes, which are up to 2.5 meters high, the fruits ripen with a delay of around two months from the beginning of July. As with raspberries, fully ripe and very unripe fruits can hang right next to each other. You can recognize the ripe blueberries by their dark blue color and their plump shape. When picking, they can be easily torn off the bushes with gentle pressure with two fingers. In contrast to harvesting wild blueberries, bruising individual fruits of cultivated blueberries is less serious, as their pulp and juice are not colored blue and therefore do not turn your fingers and hands blue.
Accelerate and facilitate harvesting
If you have very large quantities of blueberries to harvest, you may want to purchase a so-called blueberry comb. This is a box-shaped harvesting device which consists of a front part with metal tines arranged like a comb and a collecting container. It allows several berries to be stripped from a branch without tearing off the leaves. However, this requires some practice, otherwise the unripe berries, which are often very close to the ripe fruits, will be torn off. Larger quantities of blueberries can be processed into various delicacies such as the following:
- Cake with blueberries
- Jam
- fruit juice
- dried blueberries
- frozen berry mixes for sundaes and desserts
Tips & Tricks
If you can't eat blueberries fresh or cook them straight away, it's better to leave them hanging on the bush. They usually last better when hanging on the plants than in the refrigerator or at room temperature.
