Mid-July to mid-August is blueberry time up north. Nothing tastes better than a pie or pancakes made with fresh wild blueberries. Part of our family tradition is going out to the woods on a blueberry-picking expedition. If all goes well, we come back with a gallon or more after an hour or two of picking. Most berry pickers have their favorite patches, the locations of which are as closely guarded secrets as the passwords to their bank accounts. If you have never gone blueberry picking and want to start, how to begin?
First of all, you need to know what to look for, and I’m not talking about cultivated blueberries, which are a different species. Wild blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolia) are very low bushes, usually not much more than a foot high. During the height of the season, they are easy to recognize because they are covered with blueberries at various stages of maturation (Fig. 1). When there are no berries, they can be distinguished by their small, almost shiny dark-green to reddish leaves and reddish stems. Earlier in the summer, the bushes are covered with small white bell-shaped flowers (Fig 2). These flowers are visited by bees, which carry their pollen to other plants and cross-fertilize them
The big question for the novice (and even experienced) berry picker is where to look for them. Blueberries thrive in acidic (pH 4-5), somewhat sandy soil, especially in forest areas where patches of pine trees have been cut down in recent years. They don’t do well under dense tree cover, and it takes 8-10 years for a plant to mature from a seed. I find it best to locate an area where pine trees have been cut down, and new trees have had a few years to begin growing. In an area like that, they seem to do best in locations where rotting logs or tree stumps are in contact with the soil, probably because it makes the soil more acidic. Blueberries are usually found in small patches anywhere from 5-15 feet in diameter. The reason for this is that all the plants in a patch came from a single plant and are connected with one another through underground runners, called rhizomes, all of which initially sprang from the original plant.
Credit Wikipedia
One of the negatives of blueberry picking is the attendant bugs. It is important to check yourself very carefully for woodticks when you come home from a picking expedition because much of the time you are on your knees or are in contact with all sorts of tall plants or bushes, where woodticks lurk in search of a victim. More maddening at the time are deer flies, which often peak in numbers about the same time when the blueberries are at their peak. The density of these pests varies widely from year to year. One year they were so bad that I counted about 75 of them resting on the outside rear-view mirror of my car. The next year, I encountered only one in an entire picking session. Old-timers have told me that a bad mosquito season is followed by a good deer fly season and vice versa. Over the years, I have found this generalization to be surprisingly accurate.
People like blueberries not only because of their taste but because they have a very high content of antioxidants. These antioxidants are twice as concentrated in wild as in cultivated blueberries. The major antioxidant is a compound called anthocyanin, and in addition to slowing down the aging process, it is said to improve vision, be anti-inflammatory and reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Regardless of their health benefits, wild blueberries are delicious, and once you have tasted them, it will be hard to go back to eating cultivated ones.
