Ripe for the picking
North Mississippi blueberry farms ready for customers
Belated opening due to weather worth the wait
For a tranquil, family-run farm in central DeSoto County and another to the south in Tate County, it’s the calm before the storm — the opening-day storming by the public eager for row after row of blueberries.
Nesbit Blueberry Plantation opens to the public — for either you-pick-’em or ready-picked — on Friday, and Peggy’s Blueberry farm near Senatobia launches next week for the several-week season, somewhat shorter than usual due to a late start owing to the cooler, wetter spring.
“We were due to open June 10. I’m so excited to get started and see what all’s going to happen,” said Terri Cooper, a seventh-grade teacher who’s spending her second summer on the 30-acre DeSoto County farm started by father, George Traicoff, in 1984.
“Even when it’s hustle and bustle, people like to come and just be out in the country,” Cooper said. “We have people who’ve been with us the whole time; coming here’s part of their summer vacation. For newcomers, there’s no experience necessary, so bring the kids. We don’t just turn people loose; we’ll put you on a bush and show how it’s done.”
She expects several hundred during opening day and vehicles “double parked” by two tree-lined lakes that serve for irrigation and freeze protection. For the weekend, Cooper is looking for at least a dozen family members to help out, including husband Chris and three grown sons, Chase, Cameron and Christopher, and sister Tracey Boeye of
Atlanta: “She’s my righthand woman.” Cooper has four siblings in all.
Meanwhile, her stillactive dad, 79 and “a commodities trader in another life,” guided a tractor mowing grass between rows “to make things pretty” and less buggy. And Cooper’s niece, Maggie Boeye, sister Tracey’s daughter, and here for the season, was helping stack jars of blueberry jam and butter.
Blueberry farming’s not likely her career path, said Maggie, but the rows point a way.
“I actually think I’d like to be a teacher, because I like helping out the kids that come here,” said Maggie, who will be a high school sophomore this fall.
About 25 miles south at Peggy’s Blueberry Farm, formerly the Hudspeth farm, owner-operator Peg- gy Crockett was getting things ready for a horde of picky visitors as several plucky contract workers on seven acres were filling dozens of white plastic gallon buckets for Crockett’s commercial customers. These include Easy Way in Memphis, the Agricenter near Germantown and Number 3-Eagles Produce in Pontotoc.
A registered nurse for 35 years across the region and a blueberry farmer for seven, Crockett, who grew up in tiny Sarah, said she wanted to get back to her rural roots.
“People said, ‘How can you be a farmer?’ And I said, ‘How could I be a nurse when I was in my 20s? I just jumped right in” to take over the already-planted farm. “You know, you spend half your life trying to get away from your beginnings, and the next half trying to get back to where you came from.”
Her grown son, Cory Mask, now lives just a house away from Crockett’s cozy farmhouse and he “grows fig trees and mows for me, and I do the weed-trimming.” Her brother, Robert “Rabbit” Ivy, handles a lot of the commercial deliveries.
Now it’s the public’s turn and Crockett knows they’re ready.
“We’re late getting started, and people who pick maybe a dozen gallons, freeze them and use up one a month have already run out,” she said.
The career nurse says blueberries aid memory and other needs: “If you eat blueberries every day, you’ll go to the bathroom every day.”
Crockett’s chemicalfree produce “is as clean as it can be,” said a healthconscious regular customer, Dr. Roger Cunningham, a Memphis cardiologist. “I can eat them all day,” he says of the fresh blueberries he drives for all those miles to pick up.
Growing blueberries can give you the blues, as any farming is subject to fickle weather and other challenges, say Crockett and Cooper.
“In my second year, all the blueberries froze,” recalled Crockett. “There was a frost on Good Friday.” She also contends on a regular basis with armadillos and ducks.
Cooper says a family of geese loves to “eat up all the blueberries on the low branches, but they won’t eat any on the ground. Darned if I know why — maybe they learned that from watching all the people.”
But these blueberry growers will never give up; the roots are too deep.
“We just love it, love it, love it,” said Cooper.