Where do your Blueberries come from?

The ones we buy from the store come from BC. Huge berries, but taste like water. I’m going to pick my own once this heat wave is over.
Small wild blueberries taste much better!

Where do you guys get them from in the States?

Store. So ? Dont know

I bought 23 quarts and 10 pints of blueberries at an Amish auction yesterday. The blueberries in the quarts came from Michigan and I believe the pints did too. The berries have very good flavor.

Keith

My blueberry bushes

best blueberries I ever ate were picked wild near a small town in Germany called Strullendorf

My daughter and the grand sons go out and pick all those little low to the ground Alaskan blue berries and make a day of It. No way am I going to work that hard for a bunch of blueberries. But they do taste good.

Lucky dog!

There's a wild field about 1/2 hour from here. It's nothing to go out and be picking with about 100 other people. They're low bush so you gotta be real careful about the snakes.

4 years ago we were picking and a bear came out and started eating about 100 yards from us. It got to about 25 yards away so I walked out on the ATV trail and dumped about 1 gallon out. He was a very happy bear.

Blueberries grow all over our place, but they are scattered and small. It would take forever to pick a quart. We had some logging done about 25 years ago, and that area was disturbed. The following summer the blueberries went nuts on that land. We picked buckets of them. After a couple years the patch went back to normal (sparse and tiny). The morels got thick that next year too. Same deal with both if there is a wildland fire.

Aldi's. No wild ones around where we live.

Moosetrot

From the store, and they're the size of marbles. Hard to bake with. If you can find a Trader Joes, they have frozen wild blueberries that are normal sized.

There are a lot of wild blueberries here. Me and my wife can pick 8 4L ice cream pails of berries pretty quickly. Most times when I start picking berries it turns into chanterelle picking really fast lol. They’re plentiful this year too!

Safeway. Depending on the time of year, the carton says Chili, Ecuador, Mexico or USA. Nice big berries. Most the time they have good flavor.

who's your huckleberry

You need acidic soils to grow blueberries or the plants will die. For fruit, Michigan, Ohio and Minnesota produce the best quality, because they receive the correct rainfall and their soil elements have not been depleted. Worst fruit in the world comes from Washington state, as their orchards have been in production too long, and it rains volumes there, BC is better on fruits as their orchards are newer, but the Catch 22 in it, is size matters, and growers plant the large berries which have little flavor.
Chile produces pretty good fruit, otherwise those of us who buy from the market, get whatever is left over one the metropolitan markets take all the quality. Our blueberries have to be cooked, or they are bland. Adding lemon juice helps, and a little cinnamon in making jelly which we just did last week.
As fruit is mostly water, the bigger the fruit, the less flavor as there is less structure to hold the flavor.
For an amusing communist story in this, Fidel Castro of Cuba decided to spend a fortune developing huge strawberries. He got them to the size of baseballs, but they were mushy with no flavor. It is the lesson in this that fruit and grains need proper soils, as the dirt does flavor the end product. Washington state needs a big volcanic eruption to cover the state with ash, so their fruit will have proper flavor again.

Local and delicious.

Fifer Orchards

https://www.fiferorchards.com/


Bennett Orchards

https://www.bennettorchards.com/

Nice history lesson!

I’ll try to post pics of the blueberries that I pic. Saskatoon’s were pretty crappy this year.

I get mine the same place you do and not all that far from you. This year is shaping up to be a fine blueberry crop although I am of the opinion it's a week or so early yet. Lots of green ones. I don't think even the bears would eat store bought berries.

We call these lowbush huckleberries. Lot more flavor than domestic blueberries. And there just coming on strong!!

More

Oh thank goodness I was scared this was gonna be another hair gel picture post.

JP I have no idea where blueberries come from but I can tell you they all end up in the same exact place if I am around. Raspberries too for that matter!

Yea custard pies!!!

Yep, only have 3 bushes but have picked 5 gallons so far this year and there is still a few left.

Nice! I may only get out in a week so that would be perfect if they’re prime then. I’ve seen bunches here and there without looking for them and they all seemed to be ripe already.

Lol. I might put my face on a jar of blueberry jam and sell it to Walmart just for you to look at! Lol

400 bushes and 50 cents a pound 2 miles from me.

I'd fill one freezer if I had that kind of access!

Got 7 bushes that are over 75 years old on our property and we get 30-35 gallons a year off of them, we freeze enough to last all year

What do you guys mean when you say “bushes”?

We’ll say “patches” but never know how many berries a patch will produce. And there’s no way of knowing how many patches are out here. 1000’s?

Get them from Oregon.They are the best you can find from here.Wild Huckleberries are the most sought after here.

We pick them. 16 gallons so far this year. Usually get around 30

I picked some awesome blueberries in Germany also in a little town called "Holdsembackfromfloppin" Come to find out,thats the German word for brasserie.

I've got two acres of them and the flavor is outstanding. I have tried the imports form South America and cannot understand how anybody can eat them. Most of them mushy and poor flavor or picked half green.

My favorites for flavor are Legacy, Chandler, Spartan and Liberty. The Chandlers are quarter-sized and very sweet with a decent acid balance.

The ones in this pic are Ocklockanee which were developed in Georgia. A Rabbiteye type. I pick Ocklockanee starting in mid- August and they keep producing here in western Oregon until late October.

That’s a good haul! That’s what our blueberry plants look like here!

Now that’s a good bunch right there!!

Don't forget your shoulder checks in the blueberry patch. We had a picker killed by a black bear here in Ontario in recent days.

Hankit I can see some Winter green in the corner of you picture.....that is what Bayer used to make the first ASA and patent it.

Berries are sporadic with the plants that shut down because of last years drought, bloomed early and produced good this year. Ones in the ferns are just coming on in production

South of you there has been enough rain to get them going.

Take upstatesNY advise and take a whoopee sheet for you wife's back

Did somebody mention huckleberries? In a good year I can pick about 25 lbs in a day of the infamous mountain huckleberries. They grow above 4500 ft elevation in Oregon.

We are probably headed to a pyo blueberry farm tomorrow. Blueberries do not grow wild within 6 hour drive from here.
The farm berries are quite good and you can buy baked goods on site so it makes this fat kid happy

Geeze! That’s my biggest fear when I’m out there!



Sweet! Have fun tomorrow!

Geeze! That’s my biggest fear when I’m out there!

Always invite a berry picking partner who you know you can outrun.

Lots of high yield bushes here for blueberries. Problem for me is that they are full of worms and don’t taste so wonderful. I much prefer these.
Nearly identical bush but a much superior berry.

Lol Crit-R-Dun!

Mad_mike, what kind of berries are those?

The difference between bushes and patches are.... Bushes are generally high bush blueberries. They look like tree almost. They get to about 8 feet tall. I think most commercial places have high bush.

Patches are usually low bush variety. They don't get much over knee high. Around here they grow in almost field-like groups. They're mostly wild.

I get mine from my bushes, I have mostly wild berries with a few cultivated ones, So far I have picked about 20 quarts of wild and the others are just startin, I have probably picked 4 quarts of them. Yhe wild are much better.

Ok thanks! That makes sense. We definitely only have low bush then. Never heard about high bush before.

JP, those are red huckleberries.

Store blueberries come from Chile in early winter. Florida blueberries hit the grocery stores in early feb, then they work their way north from different states. North Carolina and New Jersey produce a lot of blueberries but the largest producer of blueberries East of the Mississippi is Michigan. The container in the store usually has state of origin on it.

From my back yard, if I can keep the birds off them. 5 bushes 3 high bush 6-7ft, 2 low bush 3-4ft. Really just started with them only 4yrs old.

Cool! I’ve never heard of them before.

Locally grown.

Wish we had some decent picking within a reasonable drive of here.

the farm 4 miles down the road

We use to have a blue berry rake. It was like a large comb worked pretty good.

Wild Alaska berries are the best. Very flavorful. Make great pies and jams. They are time consuming to pick.

Picked 5 gallons today and then got distracted!

Bought 2 1 lbs packages yesterday. They are from California

Nice! I went out today to pick blueberries but ended up getting distracted and scouted for deer instead.

Gibb, I have a ramp built like yours, they are slick.

From your video, it looks likes your plants are different than ours, interesting the difference

JP, did you get any blueberries yet?

I picked 6 gallons this weekend, should be good for another week yet, maybe even two.

Yes Steven, I finally got a chance to go for a bit yesterday evening. I went out to pick Chanterelles, but the trail had a bunch of trees that fell and blocked it off. So I started to pick the blueberries instead.
I picked 4 litres in about 45 mins. The mosquitoes were pretty bad and I was upset about not getting chanterelles so I went home early.



I’m eating berries and cream for breakfast for the next while!

That variety is my favorite. The chalky blue ones that grow near that variety and usually a little lower in elevation are okay too, especially when made into jam.

Vaccinium membranaceum is the mountain huckleberry from the above picture. I'm thinking that the tarter blue huckleberries you mention would be V. ovalifolium that tend to grow on the edges of alpine meadows and around alpine lakes. Also know commonly as bilberries.