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.

"I picked about 10 pounds of blueberries last week. Froze 'em, ate 'em, baked a cobbler -- and I'm back. They're delicious." said Susan Hewman, as she worked her way down a lane of bushes, a white plastic bucket tied about her waist. "I'll come again before the season's over."

Max and Anne Robinson began planting blueberry bushes on the farm's hillside in 1993. They invited the public to start picking in 1998.

"I haven't been without blueberries for breakfast since about '98 or '99," said Robinson, although he does have competition.

His competitors are named Hannah and Katie, ages 17 and 15, and Ben and Nathan, ages 14 and 11 -- the couple's offspring, all seasoned pickers and consumers. "I'm competing with four teenagers now. I don't always get my share," he said with broad smile.

He stood amid the farm's four acres of bushes, each as tall as a door frame. The blueberries are laid out in neat parallel rows on a sloping hillside, so they may be picked from either side.

The field is, effectively, the office where Robinson now goes to work, leaving behind his former lives as a Jackson County school teacher and assistant lab instructor at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine in nearby Lewisburg.

Robinson recalled the blueberry farm's early days, when his plants were knee high "and praying that someday they'd be this big," he said. "It's rewarding now to see them producing more than I thought they ever would."

He always wanted to be a small farmer, he said, and is hugely pleased he finally found the right thing to raise.

"My grandmother's family has an apple orchard in Sutton -- Morton's -- and I wanted to do that. The more I looked at it, there wasn't any living in it. A friend of mine . . . said, 'You should try blueberries, they're pretty easy.' They aren't pretty easy, but it was enough to get me started."

Blueberry farming is more than a full-time job, said Robinson.

"I prune from October to March, every day. We spread a lot of sawdust. There's irrigation problems and disease problems. We try not to spray, and so some of those things are harder to take care of when you don't rely on sprays. That's part of why we prune so hard."

Like any crop-based farmer, his field owes its success or failure to the grace or fury of Mother Nature. Last year? Not a year he likes to recall, when a devastating killing frost struck the hillside.

"We lost the crop -- had a 15 percent crop. I had to hang drywall for a friend. You never know if it's going to happen again. It could've happened again this year. Two years in a row probably would have done me in.

"Everybody comes in and says, oh, maybe this'll be a great year to make up for last year. But the best you can hope for is that you save some money, so when it happens again you'll be able to handle it."

He added with a chuckle, not without gallows humor in it: "I'm getting too old to hang drywall."

Pick me

Judging by the crowds on a recent visit, this year indeed appears to be going well.

The farm's blueberries sells for $1.75 a pound and the picking will go on through the first week of August. Then, a picking season for the farm's smaller field of red raspberries runs into October with those berries going for $3 a pound.

The entire hillside is covered with overhead netting to protect the berries from serving as breakfast, lunch and dinner for birds. This allows them to grow to a large size, sometimes almost as big as marbles, although customers have their berry-picking druthers.

"Some people like enormous berries because they can fill their buckets fast," Robinson said. "Some people like little berries because when you put 'em into a batter they don't sink to the bottom -- if you put them in muffins they'll stay in the muffins. And sort of like wild berries, a lot of people think that the smaller berries have a more intense flavor."

The farm features about 17 varieties and 2,600 blueberry plants overall. The place yields "30,000-some pounds" of berries each successful season, Robinson guestimates.

Many people associate blueberries with the low-bush berries found in Maine, but higher bushes like his come from New Jersey, which grow in bogland conditions.

"Blueberries are like rhododendrons -- they like acid soil," said Robinson. "So, we had to make the soil acid, and we have to continually work to keep the organic material real high and the soil acid and moist. They like a lot of water."

There are actually a lot of wild blueberries in West Virginia, he pointed out. "There are some species in West Virginia that grow up on ridges like Dolly Sods. They would be much smaller and probably have a more intense flavor -- makes it harder to pick. That's what we see here, people can pick a bucket in a short amount of time, and they like that. It makes it worth it coming out, because people are in a hurry now."

'I could do this'

Robinson is grateful for the advice he got in the early '90s from another West Virginia blueberry farmer

"At that time, the only blueberry farm I could find in the state was Bob McConnell, who is in Grafton. He was gracious enough to answer my questions. We've been friends ever since. After looking at his and talking to him, I thought, 'I could do this.' And you need that."

He, too, is now passing it forward, if you will.

"I understand that there have been four or five more people in the state who planted at least a small patch after they came here and asked me questions -- and went home and decided to do it."

He wonders why there are not more commercial blueberry patches springing up around the state -- with one important caveat.

"I wouldn't want to see three more farms within a half-hour's drive of here. We don't have the market. [But] I am surprised that there aren't six blueberry farms like this within a half hour of Charleston. Or Parkersburg. Or Clarksburg. I think they could take off and do it."

But it does take some money to get a blueberry business started -- and the plants take a decade to fully mature, he said. "There's no payoff for, basically, 10 years."

On the other hand, once the pieces are in place and the bushes are pushing out berries and the caravans start arriving at 8 a.m. to grab their blueberry buckets, he couldn't be happier.

"It's a tremendous joy. I love to do it. Not that I don't get frustrated or aggravated sometimes. But I love to do it. I'd recommend it to anybody who doesn't live within an hour or two of me."

Reach Douglas Imbrogno at doug...@cnpapers.com or 304-348-3017.