NEWSLETTER E VERSION, 2021 By Dan Childs

CHILDS BLUEBERRIES (.COM) EVERYTHING BLUEBERRY

Humor me and let me bend your ear a bit. After a full day of farming in preparation for our Saturday Farm Markets, I have just enjoyed a glass of our RAZZELLE TRIFECTA WINE © and my aches and pains and stress reduces as I relax. It truly is the BEST wine! Our friends who like dry grape wine love our sweet Razzelle Trifecta as it crosses that sweet/dry barrier. No headache and you get the Trifecta of SUPER FOODS in a glass after a long day. Raspberry for anti-aging, Blueberry to fight cancer and Elderberry to boost immunity. The Italian tradition is to have a glass of wine with dinner each night and their heart disease is much less than the States and if you’re going to do that, enjoy the Trifecta while you’re at it! Is $30 a lot for a bottle of superb chemical free wine? NO! there is at least $15 worth of top-quality fruit in each bottle with no shortcuts and I have seen wine made like it but with chemicals for $150 a bottle. Try my wine. It’s awesome-nice relaxing chatty buzz! Case price, $300. I am limited to using only the fruit I grow, for qualities sake, so it does sell out.

Next, let’s talk BLUEBERRIES. You already know our microclimate at 2250 feet does not have mosquitos because of the elevation. You know our 8-foot deer fence keeps the deer out which means no one has seen ticks in our fields. You know we have used vinegar for 25 years to help manage weeds as it lowers acidity of the soil and is better than the Roundup used by most farms. I read a Denmark article on the internet back when it was freer than today and they found Roundup in people’s urine 25 years ago so we looked to vinegar, weed whacking, and mulch but didn’t share it treating it as a trade secret but with folks coming up to speed on food safety, it was time to let that cat out of the bag. The vinegar is a lot more work because the weeds grow right back so you have to repeat the work over and over whereas Roundup once and done but we feel it is worth it plus the SNAKES you find in most fields are absent as they hate the vinegar.

Mosquitos, ticks, snakes, vinegar…. oh, right…CHEMICALS. I try blueberries in the winter when they are in a fruit dish and when I bite them, they pop from the fungicides used. OUCH! The conglomerate farms use fungicides that you can’t eat the food for 60 days after application as it enters the leaf, then the bud, then the berry and in return, stores can keep the produce on the shelves for extended times. A raspberry, for example, has a shelf life of 1 to 3 days after being picked without these chemicals. Even the organic is sprayed with Spinosad which is 3 days after application to eat the food and has moderate residual which translates to hard to wash off. Why do they use Spinosad? The bugs never left the world-they are still out there--so to farm on a conglomerate farm size rate big enough to supply every box store with organic in America, they must spray as they can’t micromanage like family farms i.e. Childs Blueberries.  In 1984, Dad attended classes at Cornell and they said, use pheromone traps and if you catch one pest, spray with the mildest spray (1-day, low residual) to nip the problem in the bud much like preventative medicine. So, we took that to heart and for 37 years have had pest free blueberries. Once the pests are there, they burrow into the soil and have a 1-to-3-year gestation which means to cure the problem, the farmer would have to spray with a pretty heavy insecticide (like Sevin; 7 days to eat/moderate residual) after every rainfall and every 7 days for 3 years. We avoided that by diligently checking our pheromone traps daily from green berry until the second frost.  That is Beyond Organic-a term coined at Childs Blueberries.

BLUEBERRIES THAT TASTE GOOD. Well, as said, our soil at 2250 feet is a microclimate for our area and is like Maines’s soil. If I try to grow corn, it only gets knee high but blueberries flourish.  That unique soil gives our nutrient dense blueberries a special taste far better than the ones in the stores grown in sand which are bland, machine picked so that rancid berries are mixed in with the ripe berries and each berry receives a bruise from being batted off the bush. There is a company that labels their frozen berries as “Wild”. Customers think—oh, the ultimate organic—wild! NO. They are a wild variety which are machine picked=over ripe, rancid, bruised- and grown using insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. Nothing wild about that but the label they put on their fancy marketing package. So, I suggest freezing your own Childs Blueberries. You spend how much on food on an annual basis? If you are eating blueberries every day it is the MIRACLE BERRY and you are wise but you want good fruit! We sell that and offer peak season quantity discounts.

CHILDS Untainted Raw Blueberry Blossom Mountain Honey has the purest taste, a 5000-year shelf life, and offers many health benefits the least of which is helping minimize allergy symptoms. Our honey is best for you as it is heated only to hive temperatures of 95 degrees. Most local honey is exposed to the lawn chemicals, farm pesticides, automobile and factory fumes and more, all of which gets carried to the hive by bees where it is concentrated thus tainting the honey. Our honey comes from the remote, Enchanted Mountains where Childs Blueberries is located on our 100 acres, Beyond Organic, sustainable family farm. Mountain honey is revered for its purity. $15 a jar only at Childs Blueberries.

CHILDS BLUEBERRY OR RASPBERRY SYRUP: Made with over a pint of my fruit and very little sugar it has big flavor! Delicious on ice cream or French toast but top with maple syrup to create Blueberry Maple Syrup. Simply wonderful! Also, pour on chicken or pork just before you finish cooking letting it caramelize and then use it as a dipping sauce

CHILDS JAMS are made with my fruit and are low sugar, big flavor. Most jam is half corn syrup or sugar to disguise the low-quality fruit. All you taste is sugar, not fruit. With Childs you taste the fruit. No shortcuts!

TO FREEZE OUR BERRIES: Buy our big basket flat special. Set the entire basket in the freezer for a day or so, then tap the side to loosen the berries and pour them into the double thick, BPA free freezer bags we provide you. Done! Except if you return the basket, you get a $2 credit for recycling! The other way to get that handful of blueberries super food each day for health is to drink my wine. Both work!

TO EXTEND SHELF LIFE OF BERRIES: Place a paper napkin in the bottom of a bowl, layer in the Childs Blueberries, add another towel and continue layering then cover loosely with tin foil. Adds twice the shelf life of leaving in a plastic bag. An alternative is our two-quart basket special. Just place it in the refrigerator until it is time to freeze any that remain.

We are at:

*East Aurora Farmers Market, 7 to 1; Wednesday and Saturdays-behind McDs in the TOPS Plaza.

*North Tonawanda Farmers Market, 7 to 1; Saturdays-on Robinson St. off Colvin.

*Williamsville Farmers Market, 8 to 1; Saturdays-Island Park, Williamsville.

*Olean Farmers Market, 8 to 1; Saturdays-Lincoln Park, Olean.

*Farm Store-3172 Cooper Hill, Humphrey Township, Hinsdale, NY, 9 to 6; Monday-Friday-ready picked berries and all our other products like wine, jam, syrup, honey and pie. We open off season by request for frozen firsts, seconds, wine, syrup, honey, jam, etc. Call 716.229.9779

*CHILDS UPICK—Open Tuesday through Sunday, 9 to 6; All of August-you save about half picking yourself but if the experience is what you seek, there is no better than Childs Blueberry Farm. If you are coming down Route 16, there is a blueberry farm before Franklinville. That is not us, go five miles past the light in Franklinville and then follow the signs to Childs Blueberries another 4 miles up the hill to 2250 feet. No mosquitos, no snakes, no ticks, free ride up to the nicely maintained field and nutrient dense, Beyond Organic, sweet berries.

Thanks for listening. Hope to earn your business! Dan & Carrie Childs.

 

 Childs Tried and True Recipes to Rave About

 

Delicious New York Times Blueberry Muffins: Cream 1/2 c. butter and 1 1/4 c sugar until light. Add 2 eggs one at a time beating after each addition. Sift 2-c. flour, 1/2-tsp. salt, 2-tsp. baking powder together, add to creamed mixture alternately with 1/2 c. milk. Crush 1/4-pint blueberries with a fork and mix in batter. Fold in 3/4 pint of fresh or frozen, unthawed blueberries whole. Grease 12 large muffin cups and fill. Sprinkle 3-tbs. sugar over tops of muffins and bake at 375 for 30 minutes. Cool 30 minutes before removing. Over 1000 Blueberry Muffin recipes were submitted in a contest and this is the one that won. My recommendation….use more blueberries than called for!

 

YUMMY Blueberry-Graham Cracker Ice Cream Pie: Combine 2 pints whole quality blueberries and the 1 c. sugar. Mix 1 c. water and ¼ c. cornstarch and stir into blueberries. Cook at a simmer until sauce is thickened. Set aside 1/2 c. mixture for top. Cool. Combine 1 package crushed low fat graham crackers, ¼ c. sugar and 1/3 c. margarine of choice. Press mixture into bottom and sides of 9-inch pie plate. Spoon blueberry filling over crust and then spoon about a pint of ice cream over blueberry filling. Beat 2 tbs. orange juice into saved blueberry filling and drizzle over ice cream. Freeze. Remove pie from freezer 30 minutes before serving to thaw enough to cut. Cut into 9 wedges to serve.

 

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