The Lost Art of Growing Blueberries with Fire
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
From what I remember from reading, burning
- increased growth of grasses in spring to feed native grazers
- encouraged fresh shoots from plants to grow long and straight which made them useful for basket material and arrows
- kept meadows open and barren of trees which encouraged grazing and made hunting easier
- captured and cooked insects such as grasshoppers for food
As California has suffered so much recently from wild fires, we're learning how seasonal burning was also import for preventing catastrophic fires.
Places like Yosemite were described by early white settlers as resembling a park, with large, spaced trees and grass beneath. You could see from one end of the valley floor to the other. With modern fire suppression, this is impossible, and many of the once vast meadows are now filling with encroaching pines.
This barely scratches the surface of how fire was used to manage land resources by California Indians. I highly recommend this book if you're interested in Native American practices, California history, land management, and native plants.
Oaks are pretty fire resistant, and support a lot of game — so those wide open spaces were actually oak savanna. Big prairies with one or two oaks per acre. In fact, Oregon — now known for its Douglas Fir — was wide open oak savanna, due to fire management practices of native Americans.
I remember reading but can not find a link about how people experimented with different landscape strategies (I think in Canada?) to see which techniques worked best. The best strategies were able to withstand the worst varieties of fires.
In short, “we” know what works, but applying the knowledge is expensive and works only for individuals. It’s hard for the government to compel people living in wood cabins to get a metal roof and to clear a hundred foot perimeter of forest.
[0]: https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
[1]: https://www.thisoldhouse.com/platform/amp/landscaping/210155...
[2]: https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_journals/2016/rmrs_2016_smith_...
Fuel management, through controlled burns, herbicides, and mechanical removal, plus maintaining fire breaks and exclusion zones, is what makes it possible to have permanent structures.
> After about three to five years, the plot's productivity decreases
> due to depletion of nutrients along with weed and pest invasion,
> causing the farmers to abandon the field and move over to a new area.
It sounds like the Native Americans weren't farming the land to exhaustion then moving on and repeating the process elsewhere. They were just burning an area and letting it return "naturally" (yes I know that sounds weird). I imagine that it was also not performed on quite the same scale as it is in recent times in, say, the Amazon.
Modern slash and burn strips the land of nutrients and biodiversity.
That's admirably anti-fragile, but comes with the downside of being fragile to peaceful domesticity. But it makes for a good pioneer or colonist.
A beautiful sentiment that the world would be much better off if more food producers shared.
Before we put in the replacement raspberry starts, we had a bonfire. The new ones took on the charred land and proceeded to take over the place and produce a nice harvest for several years.
Carefully frozen, there's many a blueberry pie, scone and pancake all winter long.
They don’t travel well, so you’re unlikely to find them fresh outside of Ontario, Quebec. You need Boreal forest for good ones imo.
I don’t understand why they’re hard to find in Toronto when you can find a roadside stand a few hours north that has them, often trucked from more hours north.
Lots grow well around Sudbury because the nickel smelting plant’s acid rain made it even better for acid-soil-loving blueberries.
Similar with Lac St Jean region in Quebec that had a massive fire.
They grow in massive quantities in BC. They are a major food source for black bears and their frequently-encountered shit is packed with seeds from the berries.
I think it’s because so much of the earth has been dug up and disturbed for the resorts and trails, and the plants are such effective pioneer species.
I was confused by the use of “wild” blueberries in the article. Clearly they’re being cultivated - in what sense are they wild?
I have heard talk of differences in flavor, but the best is always whichever is in my mouth.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blueberry+rakes&t=lm&iar=images&ia...
The article follows one grower. For more info I found the UMaine extension program document useful: https://extension.umaine.edu/blueberries/factsheets/producti...
Field across the road used to be a blueberry field, and one of Wyman's huge freezer facilities is a few miles down the road, along a now discontinued rail line.
Now its a high school. Ahh, goodbye nice friendly traffic pattern, I miss you.
That said, I don't think they've actually stopped burning blueberry fields, every so often I hear someone talk about it. It doesn't seem to be a lost art, just a lesser practiced ones. The kind of wild blueberries we have up here (not those fat ugly tasteless ones other states grow) seem to require it from time to time.
> Now its a high school. Ahh, goodbye nice friendly traffic pattern, I miss you.
I think I know exactly the town you're talking about.
During my time Downeast I was told I should cut down the wild berry bushes we had growing all around our driveway every autumn. Hell with that, said I. Next year, with no berries, I figured they might have a point.
So what's interesting is that article says that many (most? all?) other bluberry growers also burn, but they spray oil which burns very hot. This includes modern Native American tribes. The grower featured in the article burns straw, which is the traditional way of doing it.
He would say farmers would do it and pretend it was accidental, out of any legal context. I don't know if the practice is fully forbidden or just very restricted. But it's probably well known.
Not unlike oranges. They are available almost year round but they are exceptionally delicious for only a few weeks.
Good one.
Of course, there could be some hidden factor I'm missing, as biological systems are complex.
Burning forests, not so much (at least by standard definitions of carbon neutral). 'Carbon neutral' requires a reference frame; we usually mean from the perspective of the people doing the carbon releasing. If you burn a forest that you planted, you are carbon neutral. If you burn a forest that has been there for centuries, you are not carbon neutral.