Shingle Mill Blueberry Farm

To reach Shingle Mill Blueberry Farm, follow Highway 200 out of Sandpoint about two miles past Kootenai and turn left on Shingle Mill Road. The berry bushes come into view about half a mile up the hill, and the entrance is the third driveway on the left. In picking season, the Sandpoint Reader reported in 2019, one of the Omodt grandchildren usually greets each arrival. Pickers are told which rows are open and asked to drop fallen berries into the “bad berry bucket,” so the field does not draw wasps and gophers. The farm supplies wagons, gallon zip-lock bags and buckets.

The field covers five and one half acres inside a fence. About 5,300 plants grow on elevated beds with grass aisles between them. The bushes stand 4 to 6 feet tall on double-wire trellises. “We are always fighting moose, deer and elk,” Patty Omodt told the Capital Press in 2023. Smoking, alcohol and throwing fruit are not allowed in the field, and pets stay out because it is a food operation. A shaded picnic area with tables and benches sits near the porta-potties. Picking runs 6 to 8 weeks, from about mid-July, when the berries ripen, to mid-September, when they are picked out. On days that reach 100 degrees the overhead sprinklers run even with customers in the rows. Patty says the cooling keeps the berries plump and lets the farm stay open “a full three weeks longer than the other blueberry fields in our region.”

Fred Omodt works the front: he greets customers and organizes the crew of pickers seven days a week. Patty handles the freezers, markets and orders. Fred sees families arrive with children who have never been on a farm. “He tells them to eat as many berries as they can, while they are here — just eat and enjoy them,” Patty said. “Our u-pickers are interesting and grateful and they come from all over the world,” Fred told the Reader.

Blue markers, white markers, red

The farm’s website, as archived in 2016, walks the field variety by variety and names a family favorite for most of them. Earliblues ripen first, in mid-July, in the north field. Blue row markers flag the first 8¼ rows, about 519 plants. The Dukes stand next to them, 597 bushes and Luke’s favorite. “Guys like to pick the Duke because it’s big,” the site says. In the south field, where the farm “struggles with a high water table,” grow 1,116 Reka bushes. The site likens their flavor to “our wild huckleberry,” and Reka is Fred’s favorite. According to the Capital Press, Reka came originally from New Zealand and is the only American high-bush blueberry not descended from Bluecrop.

The 880 Draper bushes are Katie’s and Patty’s favorite, though the site calls Draper “a difficult bush to prune.” Bluecrop, “considered the mother of all blueberries,” fills 1,257 bushes under white markers and is Kelly’s favorite. The 914 Liberty plants in the south field carry red markers. Liberty has a “tropical fruity flavor” and ripens from late August through Labor Day. The Chandler was added in a short row in the barn field for mothers whose picking window is narrow. Its berries are “often as large as a quarter.”

Accounts of the number of varieties differ. The Capital Press and the Reader give six. A 2013 Bonner County Daily Bee feature gives eight, one in honor of each Omodt child, with Patriot and Jersey closing out the season. The 2025 Bonner County Farm Tour brochure and the farm’s own market listings say nine.

Much of the crop is picked by children. The Reader counted around 40 local kids picking for market in 2019. They are interviewed and trained, work from 7:30 to 11:30 in the morning several times a week, and earn $1 a pound. “They know the rules: no plumber’s crack, no cleavage, no swearing, no throwing berries and every time they enter the field they have to wash their hands for 20 seconds,” Patty said. “This is their first job and we want to create work ethic.” Ruthie Buday, a homeschooler entering sixth grade, picked beside her younger brother, four to five gallons a morning, for $25 to $35 a day.

Grapes, fudge and the steam juicer

The farm stand stays open after the blueberries are gone. It sells frozen blueberries, table grapes, grape concentrate, blueberry concentrate, blueberry bars, fudge, farm-fresh eggs and the family’s artwork. In late September and early October 2026 the farm’s posts showed baskets of grapes, with “hundreds of pounds available” and box prices for home canners. They also offered Maréchal Foch wine grapes for “your wine or concentrate.” One post described how the concentrate is made: “It starts wit sterile jars, next the lids, then the grapes to the steam juicer. After picking it’s a 3 hour process.” Frozen blueberries are sold at the farm year-round, by text or call ahead.

The same posts track the field going dormant. On September 25, 2026: “The rain is coming. We are mowing as fast as we can. Leaves are almost there for pruning to start…” Another post that day: “Have to mow high to clear the grass.. the bark is coming soon!” In 2023 Patty described a pruning season from mid-February to May 15, with a crew of two for 5,000 plants. Each row gets 3 to 5 inches of decayed sawdust as mulch, to warm the plants in spring, hold down weeds and keep in moisture. “Fred and I work full-time for 8 months of the year,” she said.

The berries also travel. The Omodts keep a booth at the Sandpoint Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, usually staffed by one of them with a couple of grandchildren. One or two daughters work the market in Moscow, which the Capital Press calls the oldest farmers market in Idaho. Patty supplies 250 to 600 clamshell packages a week to a farmers group in Spokane. The farm’s harvest ran to 300 gallons a week. Over the years Shingle Mill berries have also gone to Miller’s Country Store, Super One Foods, SPUDS Restaurant and Tierra Madre Cafe & Juicery. Visitors can stay in a farm-stay cottage on the property, listed on Airbnb, and the lawn and flower gardens are used for weddings and receptions.

The season has its own ceremonies. Daughter Karen Dignan conducts a local community orchestra. Her husband, Ryan Dignan, is the Sandpoint Middle School band teacher and a percussionist. Each Fourth of July, family and friends drum and dance with blue-painted faces and bodies, a performance the Reader says was inspired by the Blue Man Group, to open the blueberry season. In 2018 the farm’s entry was named top float at the Lions’ Grand Parade. Lions President Frank Visger and Lion Howard Shay presented Fred with a plaque. He said the family had entered the parade together for more than 15 years.

Eight votes on Shingle Mill Road

Patty and Fred Omodt met at the University of Montana in Missoula. The Reader has them living in the Selkirk Valley since 1979, and the Capital Press says they bought 25 acres near Sandpoint in 1991. “We have eight kids and did many years of 4-H. When the kids grew up we decided to grow some kind of crop on our land,” Patty said.

The Daily Bee traced the start to a family discussion about the land as Patty and Fred neared retirement age. Eight children cast eight votes. “They all wanted to keep it,” Patty said. “They said, ‘Let’s keep it intact.’” The paper observed that dividing the farm into smaller parcels would have paid better. Patty had her own reason: “We want to keep the integrity of our valley, because 50 percent of all American food comes from farms 50 acres or smaller – farms like this one.” She later put it to the Reader this way: “A number of us in the area talked about how to preserve this valley. We don’t want this valley to get all chopped up.”

In 2007 the couple took a year-long farm class from Diane Green at the University of Idaho Extension office in Sandpoint. Each month a working farmer came to talk. “When the blueberry farmer came to talk, we thought that crop sounded interesting,” Patty said.

A bow at an Oregon conference

Patty went to blueberry conferences, often in Oregon. She spent time with Dr. Dan Barney of the University of Idaho Research & Extension Service and Dr. Wei Yang of Oregon State. She brought her mother, a retired dietician, and together they tested more than 55 varieties for taste and use. At one conference she approached Dr. Wei with a question while holding her mother’s hand. “Dr. Wei bowed to my mother and introduced himself to her first, then he grabbed my hand and said, ‘I will be your mentor,’” Patty told the Reader. She said it with her hand on her heart. The trellised double wires in the field follow his advice, and the Reader reported that the family still depended on it in 2019.

The ground had to be made acidic for blueberries, with tons of sulfur and coffee grounds. The family grew oats and alfalfa for two years as cover crops to restore nitrogen. They installed an irrigation system that pumps water up from Boyer Slough. One hundred 10-ton trucks delivered mulch to build the rows. The 5,300 plants came from Fall Creek Nurseries in Springfield, Oregon. “They have the cleanest, most disease-resistant blueberry plants in the western hemisphere,” Patty said. The first went in during 2010, including 1,000 Reka plants by the Capital Press’s count.

The you-pick field opened in 2013. “We just had 20 cars in the parking lot,” Patty told the Daily Bee that July. “Word is starting to get around.” She expected about 8,000 pounds that first year and 40,000 to 60,000 within two years, depending on pruning. Managing bushes that fruit on different schedules, she said, came down to one skill: “You have to know how to juggle. And I learned how to do that from having a very large family.” The farm was not organic, she explained, because of soil conditions and weed suppression, “but we are as natural as we can be, because I don’t want any chemicals on the bush.”

That summer the children worked as sharecroppers, picking one berry for the farm and one for themselves, with 5 percent of their proceeds going to a charity of their choice. “The farm will be given to them this year,” Patty said. Her plans ran further: dried berry snack packs for children, family campsites in the trees along Boyer Slough, and landscaped lawns for receptions. Fred, she said, had a line for this: “You bite off more than I can chew.”

By 2019 the bushes were eye-high, and the Reader photographed four generations in the field, from Grandma Bertha, 97, down to Baby Joseph. There were eight children and 16 grandchildren by then. Patty and Fred said they were still learning to prune, at upwards of seven minutes a bush. “The farm has become a family magnet,” Fred said. Patty looked further ahead: “Maybe when we pass away, these kids will have something to sustain this 25 acres. Maybe one of them will manage it and it will stay as 25 acres.”