Organic Information

Blue Tara has worked for several years to earn its ORGANIC CERTIFICATION. We are very proud to be the FIRST farm in Mississippi to be granted an organic certification.

Even though the public only visits us during picking season June 1st - July 31st, we work year round to maintain the bushes and grounds. Maintenance includes things such as cutting grass - about 18 acres of it just around the bushes. There is also countless hours of hand and machine pruning of the bushes, hand clipping vines and natural blackberry sticker bushes that thrive in and around blueberry bushes. The wind and the birds carry all kinds of undesired plants and weeds into the blueberry fields, they work faster then we do and they never sleep. This creates a never ending cycle of maintenance ensuring the U-Pickers can get to their favorite bushes easily to pick that perfect berry.

If you think that the ingredients listed on some food labels are scary, just imagine if they had to list all the poison weed killers, fertilizers, antibiotics and growth hormones they used in growing the food!

To be truthful, from the very beginning in 1998, mom was too cheap to spend money on such things as chemicals and poison. She would rather spend her money on fun things, like lawnmowers (lots of them), tractors and bush hogs, weed eaters, pruning sheers and loppers. Now that’s living!

So then how does our blueberries get what they need?

Blue Tara sends up the prayers and she is blessed with pure rain and glorious sunshine. Other than that, our bushes are feed grass clippings and unpicked berries that hit the ground.

However, to be certified organic, we had to prove we did not do something!

To accomplish this we started by attending numerous classes, seminars, seeking the advise of experts in horticulture, write a manual, put up posters, develop a bio-terrorism plan, get a number from the government and take a course on how to fill out the application. We then took several hours to fill out the application, get maps of our property along with maps of all properties bordering Blue Tara and finally came the soil samples to test. Seams like they could just do the last step, but what fun would that be?

Then comes the call, CONGRATULATIONS - you are 100% chemical free!