The blueberry Maze

The Blueberry Maze

We all love the taste of blueberries and there's nothing more fun and creative than to turn your seasons of Blueberry harvesting into a large maze to go through enjoy as you pick your blueberries!

Blueberry

Blueberries are a widely distributed and widespread group of perennial flowering plants with blue or purple berries. They are classified in the section Cyanococcus within the genus Vaccinium. Commercial blueberries—both wild (lowbush) and cultivated (highbush)—are all native to North America. The highbush varieties were introduced into Europe during the 1930s.

Blueberries are usually prostrate shrubs that can vary in size from 10 centimeters (4 inches) to 4 meters (13 feet) in height. In commercial production of blueberries, the species with small, pea-size berries growing on low-level bushes are known as "lowbush blueberries" (synonymous with "wild"), while the species with larger berries growing on taller, cultivated bushes are known as "highbush blueberries". Canada is the leading producer of lowbush blueberries, while the United States produces some 40% of the world's supply of highbush blueberries.

wild Blueberries

Many species of blueberries grow wild in North America, including Vaccinium myrtilloides, V. angustifolium and V. corymbosum, which grow on forest floors or near swamps.

Wild blueberries reproduce by cross pollination, with each seed producing a plant with a different genetic composition, causing within the same species differences in growth, productivity, color, leaf characteristics, disease resistance, flavor, and other fruit characteristics. The mother plant develops underground stems called rhizomes, allowing the plant to form a network of rhizomes creating a large patch (called a clone) that is genetically distinct. Floral and leaf buds develop intermittently along the stems of the plant, with each floral bud giving rise to 5–6 flowers and the eventual fruit. Wild blueberries prefer an acidic soil between 4.2 and 5.2 pH and only moderate amounts of moisture.

They have a hardy cold tolerance in their range in Canada and northern United States. Fruit productivity of lowbush blueberries varies by the degree of pollination, genetics of the clone, soil fertility, water availability, insect infestation, plant diseases and local growing conditions. Wild (lowbush) blueberries have an average mature weight of 0.3 grams (1⁄128 oz).

lowbush Blueberries

Lowbush blueberries, sometimes called "wild blueberries", are generally not planted by farmers, but rather are managed on berry fields called "barrens". Cultivated highbush blueberries prefer sandy or loam soils, having shallow root systems that benefit from mulch and fertilizer. The leaves of highbush blueberries can be either deciduous or evergreen, ovate to lanceolate, and 1–8 cm (1⁄2–3+1⁄4 in) long and 0.5–3.5 cm (1⁄4–1+3⁄8 in) broad. The flowers are bell-shaped, white, pale pink or red, sometimes tinged greenish.

The fruit is a berry 5–16 mm (3⁄16–5⁄8 in) in diameter with a flared crown at the end; they are pale greenish at first, then reddish-purple, and finally uniformly blue when ripe. They are covered in a protective coating of powdery epicuticular wax, colloquially known as the "bloom". They generally have a sweet taste when mature, with variable acidity. Blueberry bushes typically bear fruit in the middle of the growing season: fruiting times are affected by local conditions such as climate, altitude and latitude, so the time of harvest in the northern hemisphere can vary from May to August.

Different species

Commercially offered blueberries are usually from species that naturally occur only in eastern and north-central North America. Other sections in the genus are native to other parts of the world, including the Pacific Northwest and southern United States, South America, Europe and Asia. Other wild shrubs in many of these regions produce similar-looking edible berries, such as huckleberries and whortleberries (North America) and bilberries (Europe). These species are sometimes called "blueberries" and are sold as blueberry jam or other products.

The names of blueberries in languages other than English often translate as "blueberry", e.g. Scots blaeberry and Norwegian blåbær. Blaeberry, blåbær and French myrtilles usually refer to the European native V. myrtillus (bilberry), while bleuets refers to the North American blueberry. Russian голубика ("blue berry") does not refer to blueberries, which are non-native and nearly unknown in Russia, but rather to their close relatives V. uliginosum (bog bilberries).

Cyanococcus blueberries can be distinguished from the nearly identical-looking bilberries by their flesh color when cut in half. Ripe blueberries have light green flesh, while bilberries, whortleberries and huckleberries are red or purple throughout.

Where Blueberries grow

Worldwide highbush blueberry growing areas (data from 2008)
Significant production of highbush blueberries occurs in British Columbia, Maryland, Western Oregon, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Washington. The production of southern highbush varieties occurs in California, as varieties originating from University of Florida, Connecticut, New Hampshire, North Carolina State University and Maine have been introduced. Peru, Spain, and Mexico also have significant production, as of 2018 (see Production).

Canada

Wild blueberry fields in Nova Scotia, Canada
Canadian production of wild and cultivated blueberries in 2015 was 166,000 tonnes valued at $262 million, the largest fruit crop produced nationally accounting for 29% of all fruit value.

British Columbia was the largest Canadian producer of cultivated blueberries, yielding 70,000 tonnes in 2015, the world's largest production of blueberries by region.

Atlantic Canada contributes approximately half of the total North American wild/lowbush annual production with New Brunswick having the largest in 2015, an amount expanding in 2016. Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Québec are also major producers. Nova Scotia recognizes the wild blueberry as its official provincial berry, with the town of Oxford, Nova Scotia known as the Wild Blueberry Capital of Canada.

Québec is a major producer of wild blueberries, especially in the regions of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean (where a popular name for inhabitants of the regions is bleuets, or "blueberries") and Côte-Nord, which together provide 40% of Québec's total provincial production. This wild blueberry commerce benefits from vertical integration of growing, processing, frozen storage, marketing and transportation within relatively small regions of the province. On average, 80% of Québec wild blueberries are harvested on farms (21 million kilograms (23,000 short tons)), the remaining 20% being harvested from public forests (5 million kilograms (5,500 short tons)). Some 95% of the wild blueberry crop in Québec is frozen for export out of the province.

United states

In 2018, Oregon produced the most cultivated blueberries, recording 59 million kilograms (131 million pounds), an amount slightly exceeding the production by Washington. In descending order of production volume for 2017, other major producers were Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, California, and North Carolina.

Hammonton, New Jersey, claims to be the "Blueberry Capital of the World", with over 80% of New Jersey's cultivated blueberries coming from this town. Every year the town hosts a large festival, which draws thousands of people to celebrate the fruit.

Maine is known for its wild blueberries, but the state's lowbush (wild) and highbush blueberries combined account for 10% of all blueberries grown in North America. Some 44,000 hectares (110,000 acres) are farmed, but only half of this acreage is harvested each year due to variations in pruning practices. The wild blueberry is the official fruit of Maine.

europe

Vaccinium meridionale, a wild species found in the Andes[citation needed]
Highbush blueberries were first introduced to Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands in the 1930s, and have since been spread to numerous other countries of Europe. V. corymbosum only began to be cultivated in Romania in a few years leading up to 2018 and rapidly increased in production and sales in that time (as with berries in general). As of 2018 it remains relatively unmolested by pests and diseases (see Diseases below).

Southern Hemisphere

In the Southern Hemisphere, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe grow blueberries commercially.

In Brazil, blueberries are produced in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo and Minas Gerais.

Blueberries were first introduced to Australia in the 1950s, but the effort was unsuccessful. In the early 1970s, the Victorian Department of Agriculture imported seed from the U.S. and a selection trial was started. This work was continued into the mid-1970s when the Australian Blueberry Growers' Association was formed.

In the 21st century, the industry grew in Argentina: "Argentine blueberry production has increased over the last three years with planted area up to 400 percent," according to a 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Argentine blueberry production has thrived in four different regions: the province of Entre Rios in northeastern Argentina, the province of Tucuman, the province of Buenos Aires and the southern Patagonian valleys", according to the report. In the Bureau of International Labor Affairs report of 2014 on child labor and forced labor, blueberries were listed among the goods produced in such working conditions in Argentina.