Our History with Blueberries - Reviving Their Home-Grown and Local Farm Status
By: Barbara Adams
The blueberry has a long and popular history with humans.
Considered a very old species, it was once known as star berry by
the Native Americans because of the perfect five-pointed star shape
that forms on the blossom end of each berry. Native legend tells
that the Great Spirit sent the berries to the earth to nourish the
children during a famine.
Wild blueberries are native to North America, with varieties
adapted to locations around the world from the tropics to Alaska.
New immigrants from Scotland remembered a similar berry they called
the blaeberry. Immigrants from England saw similarities to their
whortleberries back home. The Danish found the New World berry to
be remarkably like their wild bilberries, and settlers from
northern Germany saw them as kin to their own bickberren. Closely
related New World blueberry cousins also include the cranberry, and
the wild huckleberry, the latter of which most agree (although the
debate continues) has larger seeds than the wild blueberry, and is
often mistaken for wild blueberries. Blueberries, huckleberries and
cranberries are in the Heath family in the genus Vaccinium.
Long established within the New Worlds native cuisine, the
French explorer Samuel de Champlain noted natives harvesting the
berries along what is now Lake Huron, where they were then dried,
beaten to a powder, and mixed with water, cornmeal and honey to
create Sautauthig, a sort of pudding. Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark, appointed by Thomas Jefferson to explore the Columbia and
Missouri Rivers and inform Native tribes that traders would soon be
coming to buy their furs, witnessed how Native Americans along the
way smoked wild blueberries as a form of preservation for winter,
and also pounded wild blueberries into meat, which they then smoked
and dried. Both the natives and settlers used other parts of the
wild blueberry plant as well for teas and medicinal purposes.
In the early 1900s, Elizabeth White and Dr. Frederick Coville
conducted breeding work to crossbreed varieties of the wild
highbush blueberry for an easy-to-harvest tall growing berry plant
good for home gardens and farms. With continued breeding and
natural selection, their work resulted in todays cultivated
blueberry varieties. However, wild lowbush, hand-harvested
blueberries are also a niche industry of their own, offering
smaller and intensively flavored fruits. Today, in Maine for
example, a certified organic wild blueberry farm sells the berries
as fresh, frozen, dried and in preserves.
By the late 20th century, most homeowners had dropped the
time-honored tradition of having a few berry bushes in their
backyards, whether blueberries, gooseberries, currents or other
types. By the end of the 20th century, berries became more of an
item that showed up in the supermarket as a commercial product. But
local blueberry farming and home growing are old traditions
enjoying a revival. U-pick blueberry farms are finding visitors
come from miles to pick their own berries in the sunshine, and to
give their children a sense of harvesting fresh from the earth. And
people with secret family recipes made with blueberries are selling
kitchen-created blueberry items over the Internet and to local
customers.
(c) 2006 Barbara Adams
Barbara Adams Author: Micro Eco-Farming: Prospering from Backyard to Small Acreage in Partnership with the Earth (New World Publishing) http://www.MicroEcoFarming.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Barbara_Adams
Tags: blueberry
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