By Emily Buehler, Weaver Street Market Website Coordinator
If you’ve gone out picking, you know that the start of blueberry season in North Carolina brings clusters of plump berries. As the season continues, the berries become smaller and sparser, making it harder to pick a pint. This season, I’ve noticed that we seemed to miss the initial stage, with its easy-to-pick berries. My guess is that the early spring warmth followed by the mid-April freeze resulted in the death of the first berries; we’re seeing the later berries, which survived the freeze.
How did blueberries get so big? Two people domesticated the blueberry: Frederick Coville and Elizabeth White. After many people tried and failed, pampering wild blueberry bushes only to have them die, Coville discovered that the bushes prefer “poor” acidic soil. He also discovered that they produce fruit better when cross-pollinated with other bushes, that they need a cold spell before they’ll flower, and other useful facts. The USDA published his findings in 1910. White read Coville’s pamphlet and invited him to her family’s cranberry farm. She wanted to grow a domesticated variety and offered Coville land to experiment on. She recruited the local population to bring her wild specimens for cultivation. The best plant came from a man named Rube Leek, so White and Coville named it the Rubel. Coville and White sent their first domesticated blueberries to market in 1916, one hundred years ago!
Read the entire history of the domesticated blueberry, as well as the later pursuits of Coville and White, at http://daily.jstor.org/delicious-origins-of-domesticated-blueberry/.