SLIDESHOW | Bybee Blueberry Farms feeds Snoqualmie Valley
August 26, 2010
By Laura Geggel
NEW — 2:00 p.m. Aug. 26, 2010
Meg Wolf reached through the green leaves toward a plump blueberry at Bybee Blueberry Farm, looking for the perfect berry to fill the cobblers at her wedding.
“I look for big, firm blueberries,” Wolf said. “You don’t want it to be too mushy.”
She and her fiancé Seamus Kelly had recruited 20 of their wedding guests to come to the North Bend blueberry farm to pick blueberries for cobblers that would feed 125 people.
Like many Bybee pickers, the Seattle couple had made a tradition of blueberry season.
“We come out here every year,” Kelly said. “Picking blueberries is one of our favorite things. We’ll keep picking until our fingers turn blue.”
Bybee Blueberry Farms attracts thousands of sweet- and tart-toothed people every summer. The family that owns the farm has roots as deep as their blueberry bushes. Steve Bybee’s father bought the property in 1946, two years before Steve’s birth. Steve and his sister purchased it from their parents in 1980, and Steve bought his sister’s portion from her this year.
“Dad was going to sell it and move away. When we bought it, he got to live here and not do any of the work,” Steve said, laughing.
Nowadays, he manages the farm with his wife, Jayne. After graduating from Mount Si High School, Steve served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. He met Jayne when he returned to the Valley, cruising from one end of North Bend to the other in his Volkswagen Beetle.
“We’d graduated and he had already been in the service and back,” said Jayne, who was 17 when she met her 20-year-old beau.
Plants almost care for themselves
Now, the Bybees tend to their farm, and the Valley has a number of elements that help the blueberries flourish. The bushes thrive in the acidic soil, the high water table means they don’t need a sprinkler system and mulch from the grass and plants fertilize them.
“We haven’t fertilized in 20 years,” Steve said. “If you just let these plants exist, they take care of themselves.”
They do take one precaution: spraying the twigs and ground to prevent fungus. The mummy berry fungus makes the berries look like white mummies, ghosts of their blue selves. One year, the Bybees lost three-fourths of their crop because they didn’t spray, a mistake they don’t plan to make again.
Some plants are 60 years old and still generate blueberries. Steve called pruning the secret to blueberry longevity, cutting old branches and encouraging new growth.
In the winter, the bushes are bare, making them easier to prune. By early spring, the bushes blossom and then ripen into blueberries by summer, if the weather permits. The Bybees have opened their farm as early as July 7 and as late as Aug. 1, depending on the weather. One year, they stayed open until Oct. 14.
On a cloudy day in August, Kristen Gehrett, of Sammamish, asked Steve where she could find the best berries.
“Go to the middle of the row,” Steve said.
Pickers tend to start at the entry point and work their way to the end, but they should venture further into the rows, where six varieties of blueberries dangle in the breeze.
“Dig in,” Steve said.
“You really have to spread the branches apart or just get low,” Jayne said.
The Bybees said blueberry pickers serve another purpose, in addition to buying their crop, “the more where people go, the more they scare the birds,” Steve said, asking people to shield his bushes from starlings, crows and robins.
Less bird interference means more berries for pickers. The little blue fruit is full of vitamin C and E, and antioxidants, which destroy free radicals.
While the Bybees built a fence to keep out bears and elk, they do welcome bees. Honeybees are poor pollinators, but mason and bumblebees get the job done, buzzing toward flowers, spreading pollen in their wake.
Katherine Staberow, of Monroe, visited the farm with her infant son, Kelton. She planned to puree her blueberries into baby food. Her mother, Debbie Cernick, of Cle Elum, had other plans.
“I like a real strong flavor,” Cernick said. “I like to freeze them and eat them like marbles.”
New growth
The Bybees have more than blueberries on their plate. In 2008, they built a wedding venue, so lovebirds could get married at the base of Mount Si, amid sweet smelling fruit. In 2010, 15 couples got married there. Wedding season ends in mid-September, before the weather turns.
“To make a living farming, you have to have something else besides crop,” Steve said.
The family also plans to start a vineyard, planting grapes in their acidic soil. If all goes well, they could produce pinot noir.
Some changes are less welcome. Jayne’s father, Bob Vezzoni, known for playing loud Italian music for the blueberry pickers, died in May. Almost every day, people ask Jayne about his whereabouts.
“It’s been tough,” she said. “I think next summer will maybe be better.”
The Bybees have two daughters — Michelle, a nurse, and Kelli, who plans to take over the farm when her parents retire. Their daughters help them pick custom orders, which they fill at the beginning of the season when the blueberries are more plentiful.
Meanwhile, as the wedding party concluded its picking for its cobblers, Aidan Kelly, father-of-the-groom, gazed beyond the blueberries at Mount Si.
“It’s just amazing with the background,” he said. “We don’t have anything like this in Iowa.”
Laura Geggel: 392-6434, ext. 241, or lgeggel@isspress.com.
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