Book Club Cookbook’s Guest Author Blog

Jim Minick, author of The Blueberry Years

Often readers ask me, Why blueberries? Why not cherries or strawberries, why this blue fruit?

I don’t remember the first time I visited that hilltop patch, the first time I looked across the small valley to the village of Newburg where I lived, the first time I plucked a blue fruit and ate. All of these moments happened before memory even existed. My parents carried me there before I could walk, still an infant swaddled in a baby-blue blanket. And I’m sure I gobbled whatever sweetness they fed. It was, and still is, a sweetness flavored by my family’s love.

So decades later when Sarah, my wife, and I began pursuing our own homestead-of-a-farm dream, we kept coming back to blueberries, and to my grandfather’s patch. One spring day, we hiked the long rows, the bushes breaking dormancy with thousands of blooms, the air filled with bees and a sweet, honey-dipped perfume. Several of the original planting had died over the years, but the quarter-acre still held over 150 living bushes. We peered through the mass of their branches to lichen-covered trunks, stout stems, some thick as my wrist. At forty years old, these blueberries looked healthy, vigorous, and we knew every summer they still bore a bounty of berries.

During those early years, Sarah and I kept researching other potential cash crops, and we kept returning to blueberries. We learned that they’re native to this country, hence more tolerant of our weathers and insects. Compared with strawberries, blues are not as fragile, nor as prone to rot, and they are definitely a whole lot easier to pick. Plus, scientists kept finding more and more health benefits of this fruit, naming it the number one antioxidant of any food. Blueberries also work as an antidote to memory loss, an aid to night vision, and, like wine, a food that reduces the risk of cancer and heart disease. Soon the question changed to why not blueberries?

Once we had our field, an acre of 1000 bushes, I saw another reason to grow this plant, another reason to keep several bushes nearby all of my life. For a blueberry bush is simply a beautiful plant, one of many colors. Elizabeth White, the woman who helped domesticate this plant in the early 1900s, also realized this, calling it one that “few plants can compare with.” She ended a 1920 promotional pamphlet by describing this beloved bush in all the seasons:

“In the spring, the young shoots and leaves…are a rich bronzy red…[showing] the greatest variety of…delicate      tintings. One plant has dark bronzy leaves and white flowers, the next displays its clusters of pink buds against the daintiest green….[Then] [f]or a few days longer the air is filled with an elusive spicy fragrance and the fine high orchestra of the bees.” In summer, the “blueberry fields are never more lovely than just before the berries are ready to pick.” Come fall, “[w]ith the first frost, the reds flame again. Most of the plants are brilliant in autumn coloring, some astonishingly so.” And “[i]n winter the color charm of the blueberry fields does not fail….The blueberry twigs above the snow make a red tracery, which in the distance softens to a rosy haze.”

Like White, like my grandfather, and even like Thoreau and Frost, who both wrote about this fine fruit, like all of these people, I too have fallen in love with this humble plant. I too value this plant for its beautiful company in all the seasons.