One berry good place to go in West Virginia

If you’re looking to chill out in an organically sound and sweet fashion, I cannot recommend more highly picking blueberries as the morning mist rises off the Appalachian hills. The Charleston Gazette video above and the link to the companion story below portray a visit to a pick-your-own berry farm in Renick, W.Va.

With their White Oak Farm business, Max and Anne Robinson have crafted  a quintessential backcountry West Virginia experience – and the berry pickers who start arriving en masse after the berry nets opens at 8 a.m. are on to them. (Though if you get inspired to go, make tracks – the blueberry season winds down in a week or so. But the red raspberry season at White Oak Farm commences later this month).

Robinson worked as a teacher and then as a lab instructor at the osteopathic school in Lewisburg. But what he longed to do was run a small farm. ‘What about blueberries?’ a friend suggested – they’re easy. They weren’t easy, as Robinson found out. But blueberries it was. A killing frost devastated his crop last year. Yet his 2011 crop was going gangbusters the day I showed up with a video camera. An excerpt from the story:

RENICK, W.Va. — A rooster’s ‘cock-a-doodle-do’ trumpets across the misty green hills and hollows of White Oak Farm. From the lawn of the 100-year-old house that caps the property, a visitor gazes on a postcard scene of solitude in the Greenbrier County outback.

Then, the clock strikes 8 a.m. A crunch of tires on gravel fills the air. A second car arrives, followed by a pick-up. Then, two SUVs drive up the country lane to the house. They keep coming. It’s like a parade has found the place out.

The blueberry troops have come.

It’s high season for blueberry picking at one of West Virginia’s larger pick-your-own blueberry farms. And the blueberry-aholics appear to know where to find their fix …  | READ ON

Still-life with blueberries from White Oak Farm in Renick, W.Va.