Facts

Prelock Blueberry Farm

Facts

Prelock Blueberry Farm is a family owned business. This is our 12^th year in operation. We have over 8 acres of blueberries at different levels of production. All of our blueberries are sold through you-pick sales.

Our farm is conveniently located off St. Rd 38 in Tippecanoe County. We are just 10 minutes east of Tippecanoe Mall in Lafayette.

Blueberries grow on a bush and our bushes are 3 - 5 feet high. We prune them every winter to encourage large berries and to keep the berries in a 2-5 ft. picking range.

Blueberries are one of the easiest fruits to pick. There is little bending and no crawling on the ground. To pick them, cup your hands under the ripe berries and gently tap them with your thumbs. The ripe berries will fall into your hands, leaving behind any berries that need further ripening.

An average picker can pick 10 pounds in an hour, normally picking from no more than 4 or 5 bushes. We provide buckets with liners for our customers to pick into. Once the berries are weighed, the customers take them home in the liner.

Freezing our blueberries is quick and easy. The berries don’t need peeling, they normally have very few stems to remove, and they should not be washed prior to freezing. They have a natural waxy coating that protects the berries when frozen. If this waxy coating is washed off, the berries will tend to lose their shape and freshness while frozen.

We encourage our customers to freeze the berries in freezer containers without washing them since we use no pesticides on our blueberries. We also encourage folks to eat them right off the bush as they pick. If kept in airtight containers, blueberries will last up to a year in the freezer. Many of our customers come out every year and pick enough berries to enjoy for the whole year.

Finally, blueberries are easy to prepare. Frozen blueberries can be used without thawing in almost any recipe calling for fresh blueberries. They can be stirred into fruit salad, or thawed overnight in the refrigerator and added to cold or hot cereal. We drop frozen blueberries on our pancake batter while it is frying to make blueberry pancakes. We have several of our favorite blueberry recipes available for our customers on our website and also links to other good sources for blueberry recipes. We're always looking for more good blueberry recipes though, so bring your favorites out to the farm and we'll include them on the website, too.