The Origins of the Domestic Blueberry
&gt; White posted an advertisement “offering $50 apiece for wild blueberry bushes bearing berries as large as a cent.”<p>Ah. Let that be known as the advertisement that ruined blueberries. Why do we always optimize for size over flavor?<p>Commercially cultivated blueberries are flavorless compared to some of their wild counterparts. My family owns a 50-acre pick-it-yourself blueberry farm, Blueberry Park, at the top of a wooded mountain in the Hudson River Valley of upstate NY.<p>Prior to 100 years ago our farm was worked as a vegetable farm, but the fields were left fallow and wild blueberry bushes popped up. My family has owned it for about 70 years, and most of the bushes are a bit older than that. These are high-bush blueberries, 8-12 feet tall, and you can pick the berries standing up with a two-quart bucket hanging from your neck. The flavor of the berries is very potent compared to store berries, and they are smaller--about half the diameter of commercial berries (compare the crown size of these[1] to store-bought berries). They&#x27;re truly incomparable in flavor to mass-market berries. Much more potent, and slightly more tart (though the tartness and sweetness vary from bush to bush). One wild berry has the flavor of a mouthful of commercial berries.<p>Just as flavor was lost with cultivation, so too were nutrients. As an indicator, wild berries are so rich in anthocyanins that picking a quart of them will (temporarily) stain your finger tips a deep blue. Wild berries are also more delicate, and have a shelf life of only a few days in the fridge once picked (though they can be spread on cookie sheets and frozen for greater longevity).<p>Due to our career diaspora, we don&#x27;t have our farm open to public any more, but the family still goes up to pick each summer. Property taxes are so high it&#x27;s hard to hold on to the farm, but we can&#x27;t bear to sell it since we all have such fond memories of the place. My childhood black lab would run around with us plucking berries with her mouth as the family picked into buckets. One of my favorite memories of summer in the Northeast.<p>From the berries we would make pies, jams, cakes, muffins, and our personal favorite: &quot;blueberry pizza,&quot; made from unsweetened pizza dough onto which blueberries were spread with a bit of butter and a light dusting of cinnamon and sugar.<p>I&#x27;d love to sequence the genomes of some of our bushes so their characteristics could be preserved. Barring that, I&#x27;d love to propagate them to other places. My fear is that if we ever do sell the farm, a developer will bulldoze the bushes and a place that was once magical (to me) will be lost.<p>Happy to answer any blueberry questions folks may have!<p>Edit: I&#x27;d also love to chat if anyone is interested in helping crowdfund an effort to create a reference genome sequence for highbush blueberries. The genome is estimated to be about 600Mb in size, so an $8k HiSeq 2500 run (w&#x2F; prep) would give ~180x coverage.<p>1. wild, highbush (ours): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;3SgdoFn.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;3SgdoFn.jpg</a>