Wild Blueberries in Nova Scotia (Part 1)

Rideout and Vautour explained to us how famers ‘cultivate’ wild blueberries. Actually, the term they use is ‘manage’. Blueberries are a rhyzome: their root systems exist underground waiting for the right moment to push up and create a plant. They work a bit like wild mushrooms or truffles in the sense that you can’t actually plant them. They are either there or not. What I saw on Joe Slack’s fields, apart from stunning views of the Cobbequid Mountains and the mists coming off the Bay of Fundy, was a bear’s paradise: a great carpet of scrubby blueberry bushes, never climbing more than a foot off the ground.

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