‘The best blueberry’: how a tiny North American fruit took over Australia (2022)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
That's just farmed blueberries. Wild blueberries are smaller, with blue and much more flavourful insides. It's an unfortunate reality with grocery stores that since people buy based on looks, farms will optimize for what looks good rather than what tastes good.
Maximum size and number of berries are determined by variety, and largely trade off against each other, though (probably climate dependent) some varieties just don't seem to do well at all.
Actual size and sweetness is determined by how much water you give them and how long you leave them on the bush. Optimal picking time is determined by: go down and see when you think they're ready, then wait 2 more weeks before actually picking them; there should be just a handful starting to go bad. With some (but not all) varieties, you can also go by feel: if barely touching the berry makes it fall off, it's ready.
If you only have a small number of bushes and they aren't fully enclosed, the birds will eat them all before they actually ripen. At commercial scale this isn't very significant since the area can't support that many birds for the rest of the summer.
with wine grapes, sweetness (and other flavor qualities) depend on the sunlight times ratio of surface area of leaves to number of "berries". If the weather is great, you can grow more great grapes, but if the weather is poor you prune off half the fruit when it is still small and green (it's called the green harvest), and the remaining grapes come out higher quality, concentrating the sugar from more leaves.
You might try it with a blueberry bush to see if those fruits taste better.
If you remove all the excess water from farmed blueberries, the taste is about the same. You just need to aggressively sweat them.
This obviously doesn’t work if you want to eat them fresh, but there are better berries for eating fresh anyway.
No, it's a different species, vaccinium corymbosum. It's farmed, because it can be farmed, because of the bush size and growing conditions.
Wild European blueberries, vaccinium myrtillus, can't be farmed. If we could, we would, but we can't, so instead we employ hordes of seasonal workers to go out in the forests and harvest them during the month-long season.
Larger blueberries weigh more and so there is selective pressure and growing preferences which lead to large watery tasteless but heavy berries as the preference for crop outcomes.
It's all about ROI.
Blueberries are enormously flavourful but I know what you mean in that occasionally I have come across blueberries that are seemingly grown for size and not taste, and seem bland and barely tart at all. (I've experienced the same with other fruit as well, such as strawberries)
But yea if you think blue berries are tasteless you need to get some actual good blueberries. Unfortunately you've been eating the bad stuff!
Frozen berries are exported from Europe though and can probably be found in specialist shops, the French in particular are fond of them (myrtilles). The texture is unfortunately lost but the taste does come through quite well.
I think they are picked and exported frozen from Poland and Sweden among other places.
Some people make a business out of it, gather them whole day and sell them. But I've never seen them in malls, just in street markets and people selling them along the roads in season. I think they don't keep long enough for markets - you have to eat them by the day after the gathering.
We also have the "american blueberries", they are farmed industrially, and some people have them in their gardens (my grandparents for example). They are nice, but nowhere close to the real thing.
There's also 2 different species of wild forest berries, but I'm not sure how they are officially called in English (my grandmother called them "borówki" and "łochinie", but even in Poland it's regional names, most people don't know what a "łochinia" is :) ).
Today, because of this discussion, searching for some info, I found this interesting trivia observation someone blogged about: you can use bog bilberry to clean the color off your bilberry blue fingers. The explanation likely being that they are slightly acidic (it's hard to remove with just water and soap.)
https://www.godt.no/aktuelt/i/eK1GOO/baeret-som-fjerner-blaa...
These berries have many names in scanidinavia too, but in norwegian I would know them as «skinntryte».
I think this is what she called "łochinia", but it grew in the forest so I'm not sure:
They are quite intensively harvested in countries like Finland, Sweden, Poland and Belarus. The frozen berries are then exported. For instance where I live (Austria) I can buy frozen Bilberries at a much cheaper price than regular Blueberries.
If you think this is the worst offender, compare real tiny forest strawberries with that bland stuff from grocery stores. 5% of the volume, 300% of the taste. Even good ripe homegrown ones pale in comparison. Had a hike last weekend and hit the right spot of altitude and their ripeness, got stuck for an hour just nibbling on them along forest roads.
Folks go into the forests and harvest them, selling them to the stores. Similar story with cloudberries. They go for a fairly nice price. (They sell local produce in the major grocery stores here)
The rest of the year, though, large blueberries are all that are on offer if you are buying fresh. IIRC, I can buy both smaller and larger blueberries if I buy frozen.
There was an airline that serves or at least used to serve blåbär juice in-flight in or to/from Sweden. I don't remember if it was like SAS or BRA, but one of them did. Kind of an expensive way to get a taste.
Usually I just go to the forest myself. The wikipedia article says that they grow in quite a number of places around the world. In northern Sweden, they are everywhere, and you have the absolute right to harvest them for personal use, AFAIK.
The only advantage is that the American ones are easier to grow in your garden and easier to gather.
Okay, what country's dollar? Australia? Canada? The USA? And if the USA, a Sacky, Tony, or Ike? Perhaps the Guardian is returning the favors of US journalists who insist on using measurement units of football fields, swimming pools, and 747s for length, volume, and mass. I expect we will soon see time measurements reported in coffee breaks, Youtube videos, or micro-Tik-Toks.
More to that is the author Nicole Hasham is an Australian environment and energy journalist | editor | correspondent for several Australian publications.
The UK Guardian sources a fair amount of material from Australian contributors.
They have four online editions (UK, US, Australia, International). All four contain the same articles; the difference is basically in which articles are on the front page, and the hierarchy of their categorisation system (e.g. “UK Politics” is a top-level category for the UK edition, but buried deeper for the other three.) Certainly all three of the UK, US and Australia editions commission original content from local journalists designed to appeal to the interests of that country’s readers.
Coins are such a pain in the ass, but $1/2 is enough that I don't just want to refuse the change to avoid the inconveniences of carrying coins.
I have to assume that a polymer $1/2 wouldn't have this issue?
I think whether it would help is somewhat complex because polymer notes do still wear out, and lower value notes have higher usage which makes them wear out faster. IIRC the main driver for polymer was security with durability as a nice side effect.
This link https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/sep/7.html says that median life for $5 notes is 3.5 years under one measurement system, which I would presume would be even lower for $1/$2 if we used them, since they'd get more frequent usage and less storage.
It should be possible to calculate the costs, savings, and lifetime of all the coin and note variations but that's a bit much for me right now :)
Converting that to Library of Congresses or National Library of Austrailias is left as an exercise to the reader.
https://www.internationalblueberry.org/2018/03/28/eureka-thr...
International Blueberry is “a global organization bringing together leaders from around the blueberry world in all segments of the industry”
The ‘blueberry world’. What’ll they think of next!?
If you're in N America, here's the farmer that grows his cultivars: https://familytreefarms.com/fruit/blueberries/ Best chance of finding them in stories is during the March-April window in the US.
How does wild American blueberries taste? Anyone tried?
I think store bought are good in blended shakes but mostly because they add sweetness.
That’s the primary obstacle to growing them here in California and I’m really curious if they bred the frost requirement out of the Eureka blueberries, or if Australia is colder than I thought. I’d kill to experiment with growing my own because the blueberries sold here are nothing like the wild blueberries from my childhood
The farm does have Mountain in the name though so I assume they grow at a higher altitude, but I grow at a significant altitude in California too and it doesn’t drop the temperature enough, at least in high desert climates.
Still seems like they've made some progress on reducing frost requirements.
Most likely, it's just that the common assumption is that all of Australia is hot and miserable, whereas not all of it is. They're not actually in Lismore, they're near it.
My blueberries fruited without needing frost (we get none where I am in South East Queensland); it's definitely been bred out of them as a requirement I think?
That’s awesome!
Do you know what varieties you have? Did you buy seeds online or get plants from a nursery?
You're right that they've doubtless been selecting for quite a while at their site - and will therefore have varieties that are happy with chill hours for the region.
Though I'm surprised they get as cold as -3 given how far north, and how close to the coast (20km) they are.
Lismore - to their west, away from the coast - has an elevation of only ~10 metres. The township they're closer looks to be Wollongbar, and that's showing as ~160 metres elevation. I believe the soil around there is superb (volcanic, not depleted like 'average Australian farming land') which is probably a bigger factor.
I'm south of them by 4 degrees, same elevation, and have Much Optimism for my half dozen new blueberry plans ... once I get them out of pots. Shame that these Eurekas plants don't seem to be for sale.
EDIT: meant to add - some varieties that are popular here in AU - Sharpe Blue, Biloxi - have low chill hour requirements, around 300-400 say, BUT really don't like frosts, so it's quite the juggle.
I got some bixoli and sharp blues and they fruit like crazy, where we are lucky to get a few days of frost per year