Blueberry Blues 
Although it tastes better, the lowbush berry is 
more difficult to harvest and more expensive to produce 
by Raymond Sokolov 
photographs by Adelaide de Menil 
Passing through Washington 
County, Maine, in August, even the 
least-informed traveler knows that he 
is in the right place for cheap, fresh 
lobster and that he cannot go any far- 
ther east in the United States than 
this bleak, coastal pocket of poverty. 
The alert visitor also notices that many 
apparently abandoned fields are lit- 
tered with string. That’s how it looks 
at first. Then it becomes clear that 
the string has been purposely ar- 
ranged, stretched in a pattern of 
roughly parallel lines. Sometimes, peo- 
ple are hunched down along those lines 
of string. Watch long enough and the 
people move, slowly making their way 
down the string rows, and then head- 
ing back to the road, to blue machines 
set up on the shoulder. The machines 
are for winnowing, and the people are 
picking blueberries, but the neophyte 
wonders, “Where are the blueberry’ 
bushes?” 
Those accustomed to highbush blue- 
berry shrubs ( Vaccinium corym- 
bosum), which grow as tall as six to 
eight feet, have to look twice before 
they make out Maine lowbush plants 
(V. angustifolium), flourishing at an- 
kle level, camouflaged by grasses, al- 
der shoots, and sweet fern. The berries 
themselves are tiny, roughly half the 
size of the cultivated highbush fruits 
sold in supermarkets. Lowbush berries 
are almost never sold as whole, fresh 
fruits outside New England and they 
are not cultivated in the normal sense 
of the word, that is, planted by man 
from a selected stock. Lowbush berries 
are wild, naturally occurring, not 
adapted to mechanical harvesting, dif- 
ficult to ship or store fresh, and gen- 
erally impractical. But they are superb 
berries, tastier by far than the com- 
paratively insipid highbush cultivars 
grown commercially in Michigan and 
other states with more hospitable cli- 
mates. 
Highbush plants and the even taller 
rabbiteye blueberries ( V. ashei) grown 
in the Southeast have two crucial ad- 
vantages over the undeniably more de- 
licious lowbush fruits. Because of se- 
lection and hybridization begun by 
U.S. Department of Agriculture bota- 
nist Frederick V. Coville in 1909, the 
cultivated berries are very large and 
therefore appealing to consumers, who 
tend to taste with their eyes. Further- 
more, highbush plants are high. Ma- 
chines can harvest them easily and, 
perhaps more important, each plant 
can be picked selectively several 
times, so that only perfectly ripe ber- 
ries are taken during each pass. This 
means that markets get an ideally uni- 
form crop. Lowbush shrubs, on the 
other hand, can only be harvested once 
because the hand rake takes all the 
berries as it combs through the brush. 
Pickers have to wait until all the ber- 
ries in a given patch have ripened. 
By the time this happens, the early- 
ripening berries on each plant are turn- 
ing senescent, getting soft. Rough han- 
dling from the rake and the winnowing 
machine, which separates the berries 
from the leaves and stems pulled in 
by the rake, further degrades the ap- 
pearance of the berries and diminishes 
their keeping quality. 
These factors have seriously re- 
duced the lowbush berry’s -appeal as 
a marketable fresh fruit. Also, the big 
Maine blueberry companies, located 
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