1. Choose the 4th folder where you store your pictures on your computer.
2. Select the 4th picture in the folder.
3. Explain the picture.
4. Tag four people to do the same.
Since that's too complicated, I just picked a picture I haven't blogged about at random. :)
Along the old Magnolia Road that skirts Lake Pemberton, in the middle of central-New Jersey, are a number of blueberry and turkey farms - most notable amongst them is the F. W. Bush Blueberry Farm and the F.W. Bush Turkey Farm.
This short stretch of road "that time forgot" is on the back route to the Jersey seashore beaches, most directly, Long Beach Island, the home of Barnegat Lighthouse.
In the early autumn months, huge white turkeys can be seen in the sheds behind F. W. Bush's roadside blueberry, corn, and produce stand. In the early summer months, back when I was a little boy growing up, a large number of buses full of "migrant workers" would pull into the blueberry fields and pick blueberries under the hot merciless sun, swat mosquitoes, and in general suffer away in the humidity. When this employment practice was "outlawed" many of the blueberry fields fell idle and were left to fade away into the overgrowth.
The picture is of a "homemade" mechanical blueberry picker that is currently for sale. I do not know if it was successful or not; I do have my doubts; nor do I know what the asking price is! I do think it might be cool to take this for a test spin - the seat looks to be about 15 feet off the gound.
Today most of our store bought blueberries come from foreign countries where the pickers are basically paid next to nothing to perform backbreaking labor legally. I guess that they get to live at home though...
I'm going to tag AusGrl, Punkn, YellowDogGranny, and Karla and modify the rules to "pick any photograph at random" and write about it!
11 comments:
Sure is a strange looking contraption.
Looks like something right out of your "alien" files..
How does it pick the blueberries without destroying everything in it's path? Maybe that's why it's for sale.
i wish i was close enough to that many blue berries that i would need that picker..nummy...
cool..i'll do it tomorrow..i haz lotz of pictures...
Very interesting piece of equipment! I was in MI this summer, and saw some very large blueberry farms that supply most of the blueberries that are consumed in the midwest.
Thank you for participating!
So what do they do? shove the berry pickers in the machine and they still hand pick the fruit lol.....
What the most weirdo looking machine..
x
People have all kinds of weird things up for sale... Wonder how well it sold. I'm now curious as to how much it went for too. LOL!
blueberry picker? Isn't that why God gave us fingers? LOL I have to agre with wife o riley! how does it work?
Now I see why blueberries are so expensive! I didn't realize they came from other countries. I guess I just didn't think about it much at all. I remember many days in my childhood picking bluberries that grew wild in the woods behind the house we lived in. Boy did they taste good.
The blueberry bushes are about 6-8 feet tall and 4-5 feet around. The machine straddles the bush (moving down the row) and there were little paddles that spun on the inside that knock the ripest of the berries off the bush where they are vacuumed up into the back and put in a bin.
The migrant workers used to get a a cardboard ticket (like an amusement prize ticket) for every quart they picked and brought to the truck. At the end of the day, they would get paid something like 25 cents a ticket (in cash).
This was made illegal for two reasons, one, it skirted the minimum wage law, and more egariously in the eyes of the state, made collecting payroll taxes very difficult.
What a cool picture!
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