The cultivated blueberry was born in South Jersey, and today its heirloom descendants can still be found on little farms sprinkled among the big producers.
HAMMONTON, N.J. — Jeanne Lindsay often apologizes for the semi-wild state of her pick-your-own blueberry patch, which she runs on the farm her in-laws started in 1941.
It’s no wonder: Since her husband died four years ago, Mrs. Lindsay, 75, has to manage the 16-acre homestead mostly by herself. It doesn’t help that she tends to compare her 65-year-old plants — antique blueberry breeds like juicy Weymouths, Jerseys tall enough to provide shade and six tart-fruited Rancocas — to the perfectly trimmed bushes at her neighbor’s giant farm across the street.
Yet it’s precisely the old-fashioned imperfections of Lindsay’s Farm that make its moss-carpeted rows worth the trip for regulars, many of whom now bring their children.
“Some people come just for the Rancocas,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “They’re good pie berries.”
From late June until the end of July, this corner of South Jersey, known as the Pinelands, is the blueberry epicenter of the Eastern United States; this flat region of sandy soils is where commercial cultivation of the berries began a century ago. Today, New Jersey’s blueberry crop remains the fifth-largest in the nation by acreage, eclipsed in recent years by those of states (like Washington and Georgia) with more land for growers to expand into, said Mark Ehlenfeldt, a blueberry breeding specialist with the United States Department of Agriculture in nearby Chatsworth.
Most of New Jersey’s blueberries are now cultivated on vast farms with hundreds of acres, which normally grow just three high-yield varieties that can withstand machine picking and shipping: Dukes in June, Bluecrops by July, then smaller, tarter Elliots to finish the season.
New York Times, July 2, 2018, Rachel Wharton