Friday, February 17, 2023

Blueberries

 All cultivated blueberries trace their lineage back to New Hampshire. In 1905, Frederick Coville, a US Dept of Agriculture botanist, bought a farm in Greenfield as a summer home.  He found pastures full of wild low-and high-bush blueberries, so he selected one of each type with superior berries and crossbred them.  The first hybrid blueberry, released to the public in 1920, was fittingly called Pioneer, and hundreds of other cultivars have followed. Some of Coville's early varietie - such as Earliblue, Bluecrop, and Blueray - are still grown today. 

Cultivated high-bush blueberries take the strong flavor, cold hardiness, and drought tolerance of the low-bush blueberries and marry these qualities with the larger fruit, higher yields, and height of the high-bush blueberries. New Hampshire Home 2021

My great-grandfather from Nova Scotia was a blueberry farmer (among other things) who in season  would put them on a barge at 4AM from Pubnico down to Boston to be available for the morning markets. One more example of how water trade has been easier than land for almost the entirety of human existence, and if you go to a major port, you can still see it today.  We don't know what our connection is with the Wyman's Blueberry people in Maine, but we are generally all related, descended from Francis and John Wyman who came from Bury St Edmund in England in 1635 and settled in Woburn/Billerica, MA.

If this suggests to you that Wymans might have a special gift for growing blueberries, it isn't true. Not many crops grow up here, which is why fishing, syrup, apples, wool, dairy, (and rocks) were the main products up here until the mills came in. Blueberries are what grow. Pumpkins.  We also do giant pumpkins. UNH was a main source for developing cold-weather varieties of fruit and vegetables, but those were for local consumption, not agribiz. Now that freezing and transportation are good, those are less necessary.

4 comments:

  1. When I was a boy in NE rural MA, my family would go blue-berrying when the fruit came out. Of course there were also wild grapes and blackberries, but we didn't do those. At least as a family. My friends and I at play certainly did them whenever we found them.

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  2. We love them even here in Georgia. My Grandson eats a bowl at every visit. We get big bag from several places. Others are around but these preferred.

    Patsy

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  3. Leaving Pubnico at 4 am and getting to Boston for the morning market??? It takes 16 hours at 15 knots to get there from here.

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  4. Y'know, I was thinking that after I wrote it. I meant to look it up but didn't. They must have left the previous day to arrive at 4AM, and the story came through the generations inaccurately. Thanks.

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