Chris Luther’s quality control for picking gourmet blueberries is simple: Two in the bucket, one in the mouth.

Each blueberry plant tastes different and can tell him when it’s perfect.

He squeezes the half-inch wide fruit between two fingers and tugs softly. The blueberry should pop right off its red stem. If he pulls the branch more than two or three inches, the blueberry needs to ripen.

Blueberries move from pink to lavender to indigo in color as they mature. Once they’ve been blue four days, Luther said, they’re ready to pick.

On a farm in Union Point named Rhonda’s Blueberries after the farmer’s wife, Luther planted 1,100 blueberry bushes of six different varieties in the past few years. And now, in the early weeks of June, one of those varieties – Premier – is in bad need of harvest.

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