Click HERE for a slideshow virtual visit of 

Childs Blueberries--A Mountaintop Perfect for Blueberries 

Click HERE for a brief video link of the spring in the countryside.

Thank you for a great season. You can find frozen Childs Blueberries at Wegmans on McKinley Avenue in Hamburg during the winter months.

Dan Childs speaking with students on a tour of Childs Blueberry Farm

UNIQUE FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE QUALITY OF CHILDS BLUEBERRIES 

Per Cornell and Rutgers Universities teachings, we us pheromone traps to monitor the field for pests. If we catch one pest in the trap, we spray with a mild pesticide and nip the problem in the bud, sort of like preventative medicine catches an illness early while it is still treatable. If we had not caught that one pest, it would have multiplied into zillions and we would have to spray with major duty pesticides every 8 to 10 days pretty much forever since the gestation period for pests varies from 1 to 3 years. Organic farmers can use suppression sprays like Dipel or Spinosad on the fruit but this only slows the problem until eventually the pests are still in the zillions. The only proper solution is to micromanage the field and monitor it constantly, year after year, as Cornell and Rutgers recommends. So far for 2009, Childs Blueberries are PEST and PESTICIDE free.  

To me, one of the biggest problems with large mass production farms is their inability to micromanage the field and the use of machine harvesting. Berries are batted off the bush and then run through a water bath so the green berries sink to the bottom. The bath water collects residual pesticides as each berry is dropped in and passes through the water in the bath, which has no flushing system. Besides getting bruised when picked, I can't imagine being soaked in a pesticide bath just prior to being dropped into a plastic clamshell can be a good thing.

This year we added "fertigation" so that when we irrigate, we can put trace elements right in the irrigation water and this helps have a healthy blueberry field & crop. Our biggest off season task is properly pruning the field each year but we feel this helps keep the diseases out, berries sweet and berry size up. Over the last 24 years we have put enough sawdust, which keeps weeds out, retains moisture and adds to the flavor of the berries, on each bush to reach the top of a first floor building. A laboratory analysis of leaf samples allows us to formulate a custom blend fertilizer with ingredients the same as those listed on the back of a vitamin bottle. At Childs Blueberries we have said our berries are “NEAR ORGANIC".  If they were organic, we could not give our bushes this fertilizer vitamin and we prefer Integrated Pest Management and have utilized these techniques since they were new. It seems at one end of the extreme is the mass production berries and at the other end is the organic. Using Integrated Pest Management taught by Rutgers University and Cornell University, we believe we can micromanage our field and product to achieve the best of both extremes. 

Wild blueberries were compared in one study against cultivated blueberries that were grown in sand and the study found that the wild blueberries grown in the soil of Maine, which resembles our unique soil in many respects, had more antioxidants. I feel the first study used cultivated berries grown in bland sand and that was not a fair test. Berries grown in sand rely on chemically adjusted soil to make it acidic and of course do not have the micronutrients that make blueberries so especially healthy & tasty. I would love to see our blueberries included in a follow-up study of “cultivated vs. wild”. On a side note, the majority of “wild" blueberries are now mass produced by a big conglomerate farm, just like most other berries, that uses herbicides, fungicides, pesticides and indiscriminate fertilization and still calls them "wild" . You can find those tiny bb size wild blueberries at road side stands so say some of our customers who travel to Maine for summer vacations or you can visit our u-pick where we have some rows of high bush wild blueberries. Personally, I prefer the big, sweet, cultivated blueberries we grow and sell at farm markets fresh or in the winter, frozen. All of these factors mentioned above and a few trade secrets or two not mentioned are why we take great pride in providing the best tasting, sweetest blueberries I have yet encountered.

Welcome and thanks for visiting our site. Please refer us to a friend and for more detail, visit the page links above!