Comments on: Going for blueberries

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 02:54:12 +0000

Probably excellent there too. Here on the mountain we have the best lowbush blueberries and huckleberries since 1980, according to Mom, who would remember.

Also, there’s an extraordinarily heavy crop of black cherries on the way, and the wild grapes look good, too. The bears will be in heaven.

By: quiet regular

quiet regular — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:06:50 +0000

nice pail of blueberries! It’s good to know there were plenty this year…last year I seriously worried about what appeared to be not-so-good pollination. I wonder how blue that other place is this year…by the lake.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:22:41 +0000

Hi Robb, thanks for stopping by. Don’t get me wrong, I do like cities — this reaction was worth commenting on, I thought, precisely because it was unusual for me. Lord knows if everyone gravitated toward the empty places as you and I do, they’d be overrun.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:20:14 +0000

Ha! So a poor memory may serve the artist better than a good one! If that’s true, I am indeed blessed. I just need to be careful of unconscious plagiarism.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:18:43 +0000

It does make sense, Pete, and I’m with you on the alembic of recollection. That’s usually the way it happens with me, too, and maybe it is the best way to create.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:17:09 +0000

Yes, although the store-bought ones I’ve seen tend to be the enormous commercial berries, which are altogether a different fruit, as different as cultivated strawberries are from their wild cousins.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:13:59 +0000

I don't know, but the Vaccinium (blueberry) and Gaylussacia (huckleberry) genuses are both very diverse. Most of the bushes at Bear Meadows are probably Vaccinium corymbosum, but I'm not even sure of that.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:08:20 +0000

Thanks, Jean. The bog full of berries is still quite mythical to me, too, even though we have been going there every year since I was a kid.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:07:03 +0000

Thanks for the advice, Clive. I’m sure you’re right. And I wasn’t so much lamenting the time away from the keyboard as I was expressing my frustration that the poems don’t come directly from the sky and earth the way one might expect. Certainly this is part of the promise of many writers’ (and artists’) retreats, is it not? That new, often more wild environs will inspire new work?

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:04:05 +0000

I took that photo back in 2006, but filled the same two-gallon bucket this year — maybe a little closer to the rim, but not much. (I ddon’t like to risk spills on the slog back out.)