Hello! Thank you for visiting our website. So, in the off season are we open? Pretty much since farmers live where they work. Just text Carrie at 716 229 9779 and give her the time you want to swing by. She will give the okay or suggest an alternate arrangement.
UPICK OPENS 9 TO 6, WED-SUN; MID JULY THROUGH LABOR DAY.
Facebook Reel Quality of Field Maintenance
CHILDS BLUEBERRIES & FARM WINERY
3172 Cooper Hill Road
Humphrey Township, Hinsdale Post Office, NY 14743
Text or Call 716.229.9779 Carrie; 716.378.2895 Dan
Email: ChildsBlueberryFarm@gmail.com
Grand OPENING: Tentatively Wednesday, July 12, 2023
YES--BLUEBERRY Farms in the lowlands will open a few days before us. We tried opening earlier but there are so few berries ripe, it takes too long to fill a bucket and customers were unhappy. Now we wait until the berries are clustered so picking is easy. It hurts to short term lose a few customers to early opening farms but, we would rather under promise and over deliver than vice versa.
Sad CLOSING: Sunday, September 3th, 2023
Pick Your Own in mowed, manicured fields, well maintained, the view stretches for miles, multiple varieties of blueberries to choose from and at this higher elevation (2250 feet above sea level) there are few mosquitoes and the soil, which was never amalgamated by the glaciers, is perfect for growing nutrient dense blueberries. One last benefit, besides mulching and weed whacking, we use agricultural vinegar to kill weeds which snakes hate so they leave. After years of this, I can't even find a snake in our entire 110 rows of blueberries!
WHAT TO BRING:
1. A picking bucket and containers to put your berries in after you pick them. We have picking buckets you can borrow--we lend it to you clean so we ask you to return it clean. We have containers to put your berries in at our cost.
2. There are picnic tables in the field. Please pack out what you pack in. Water, sunscreen, bug spray...poncho, sun hat, etc. You are coming to a farm so just give it some thought.
A true family farm micromanaged to improve quality, health & safety of products.
BEYOND ORGANIC Example
So I have a "Gall Wasp" problem just as most of small fruit and growers do. I could spray USDA organic certified spinosad on the blossoms but that would be bad for our bees and the honey you buy from us. Also, although 99% of organic is sprayed every 3 to 4 days during the harvest (hope your not surprised organic is sprayed) with spinosad, it has moderate residual ( ie. hard to wash off) and a waiting period of 3 days after application before food is "safe" to eat AND there is a limit of 3 to 5 applications allowed per season depending on which state it comes from--but few organic farmers stop at that point- they can't! So...What do I do with Gall Wasps? I walk the field row by row and pick the kidney bean shaped cocoons off. I finished yesterday. Now the cocoons are in plastic bags in the freezer waiting for my next good fire to burn them. Thats Beyond Organic...a term coined here at Childs Blueberries! If you admire this type of hands in the dirt farming share and tell your friends about us! How do I get rid of Japanese Beetles? Generator on the back of the gator with a wet shop vac and I vacuum them up and drown them in soapy water.
Notice the theme here? True, non mass produced, mass marketed farming is VERY labor intensive and no walk on the beach!! More on Beyond Organic after the following paragraph about how fruit COULD BE good for your health...
OUR FRUIT—YOUR HEALTH
CHILDS BLUEBERRIES: Maintain healthy bones; contain natural iron, phosphorous, calcium, magnesium, manganese, zinc, and vitamin K; improves skin health, lowers blood pressure, helps to manage diabetes and helps protect against heart disease; Aides in preventing cancer; improves mental health, digestion, weight loss, and
feelings of "over full". CHILDS RASPBERRIES are low in calories, high in fiber, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. They may protect against diabetes, cancer, obesity, arthritis and other conditions and may even provide anti-aging effects. Our PURPLE DIAMOND© ELDERBERRIES are packed with antioxidants and vitamins that may boost your immune system. They can help tame inflammation, lessen stress, and help protect your heart. Search "Flu and Elderberry" to see the newest study which states elderberry may be more effective against the flu than anything else!
ARTISAN WINE MADE IN THE ITALIAN TRADITION
We use our Foremost in Quality© fruit to get juice that is like a nectar AND add in a tremendous increase in time and labor to create a nearly impossible to find CHEMICAL FREE WINE. One glass has all the health benefits of the fruits and studies find these fruits help keep the heebie-jeebies flu away and boosts immunity. The peacock represented peace, love and harmony in many cultures through the centuries and is depicted on our collectors’ bottle.
NEW! CHILDS WILD PURPLE DIAMOND© ELDERBERRY WINE--Sweet or Dry! Our Wild Elderberries are our own variety. We collected the cuttings from the backwoods of Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany Counties, rooted them in our nursery, cross pollinated and came up with a superb Western New York Elderberry variety we named Purple Diamond—the culmination of 20 years efforts. Purple Diamond Elderberries make one fantastic wine and is perfectly adapted to growing in Western New York.
Restocked after selling out last year--RAZZELLE WINE--Sweet or Dry! Childs Raspberries with a blend of Childs Blueberries and Childs Purple Diamond Elderberries. We have doubled production each of the last two years and still sold out by mid-season as folks are returning to buy multiple bottles or by the case.
NEW!—CHILDS BEAUTIFUL BLUE© WILD BLUEBERRY WINE—Many of you have tried our little wild blueberries we sell at market on a limited basis. In Maine, the lowbush wild berries grow about a foot off the ground and we have the original highbush wild blueberry which is the grandfather of all blueberries you see today. Using a cross pollination between the lowbush and the highbush wild, we have HILO WILD Blueberries and as our new plants grow up we will have more wild blueberries to sell you along with this great new wine—which I know from experience, is BEYOND FANTASTIC©
BLUEBERRY SYRUP OR RASPBERRY SYRUP--Less sugar, more fruit, no shortcuts! Many others take shortcuts but great ingredients are the foundation of a great cooking result. Yogurt, Pancakes, Oatmeal, Grilling Sauce…
BLUEBERRY JAM and Other Flavors. We put over a pint of fruit in each jar and use less sugar. Some jam makers cut corners by using low quality fruit available cheap and half sugar or corn syrup. Find out what good jam tastes like.
RESTOCKED! Raw untainted Blueberry Blossom Mountain Honey--We have three stables of bees on our land for pollination of the crop. The beekeepers love our area because we are remote and away from the pollution, GMO, pesticides, lawn chemicals, etc., all of which bees carry back to the hives. I package the honey in glass jars careful to keep it raw for best flavor and health benefits. Mountain honey we sell out of quick but it stores for 1000's of years. Over time raw honey crystallizes. Just place the glass honey jar in warm water until it turns back into liquid. Raw honey fights allergies and boosts immunity but best of all, our honey has a "pure" taste you seldom find.
STORE UP during Peak Season with our Big Basket and enjoy quality Childs Blueberries all off season! Place your ENTIRE BASKET in the freezer for a day or week and then put in the Bisphenol (BPA) free Childs Blueberries double thick freezer bag. Did you know 15 years ago, studies conclusively proved BPA was really bad for you leaching into food and causing all sorts of health problems and the first company in America to have a BPA free bag was Childs and frankly, cheap off brand freezer bags may still not be BPA free as it costs more. ALL the grocery stores sold products with BPA in them, including baby bottles, for years until regulated by government; which by their action, shows how much they REALLY care for their customers. Only Childs took immediate action and went BPA free. New studies suggest BPA may cause fat cells to abnormally double in size accounting for overweight.
FARMER DAN SAYS…. My Dad attended classes at Cornell and Rutgers and implemented all he could on safe and effective farming. We are BEYOND ORGANIC© because we have been doing what organic intended to do since our beginning in 1983 and frankly, big corporations sit on the boards of organic standards allowing so many variances and lab made chemicals, it has become corrupted. There are many shortcuts taken in commercial farming. Things like rubber stamping "organic" on imported products when there is no oversight; labeling an imported frozen product as "packed" or "distributed" in the USA when it is imported in bins and then packaged here; labeling fruit mass produced as "wild" when in reality it has fungicides, insecticides and herbicides used in the production; some fruit is left neglected, gets infested with worms (Google SWD) but is Instant Quick Frozen (IQF) to hide the problem thus the poor flavor and off taste for much of the frozen organically grown or conventionally grown frozen fruits.
At Childs Blueberries we use Integrated Pest Management. This means instead of spraying with the organic or conventional neurotoxin chemicals, I vacuum up Japanese Beetles off the bush using a shop vacuum. We use vinegar, weed whacking, and mulch to manage weeds --as opposed to commercial organic that creates a brown field (everything dead including the soil microbes) with harsh herbicides, waits three years and then get USDA organic certified which ignores half-life of chemicals used. We use pheromone traps and if we catch one pest, we nip the problem like preventive medicine does using a substance 200% milder than what is spraying on 99% of the commercially grown organic fresh or frozen produce thus eliminating the problem before it gets a foothold. Our berries are NUTRIENT DENSE. There are more microbes in a teaspoon of soil than people on earth and pesticides kill microbes. Dead soil means the bush can't uptake nutrients as in eat. Our unique soil is alive and we even feed the microbes molasses and our bumble bee population is off the scale! Only a micromanaged, family farmers can do this because big farms equal big problems. Learn more about our farming practices at ChildsBlueberries.com