Sweet and oh so healthy, blueberries garner accolades across the Midwest. We honor them at festivals, harvest them in the wilds and at you-pick farms, and most of all, revel in their fresh taste.

by Linda Ryberg

Deep-Blue Masterpiece

It's a perfect blueberry . . . plump and round, nurtured to full potential by a mild, sunny Minnesota summer. Still clinging to the bush on a July morning, this firm, deep-blue masterpiece wears a sprinkle of morning dew.

The berry proves irresistible to Alexander Prater of Ballwin, Missouri, who plucks it off and holds it up for his compatriots to see. He couldn't be prouder.

"I got the biggest blueberry!" exclaims the excited 7-year-old, who's spending a couple of hours with his family and their Forest Lake, Minnesota, friends at Covered Bridge Farm just outside town, a few miles north of the Twin Cities.

It's his first visit to a patch, but Alexander has happened into a Midwest tradition. Blueberries, native to North America from Maine through Canada and into the northern reaches of states including Minnesota and Michigan, are heralded for versatility, healthful benefits and downright good taste.

"Nutritionally, it's a knockout food," says Dave Wildung, a University of Minnesota researcher specializing in blueberry cultivation. The experts at Tufts University in Boston, who publish numerous health reports, agree.

Recently, they ranked blueberries No. 1 of some 40 fruits and vegetables as an antioxidant powerhouse, lowering the risk of cancer, heart disease and many other ailments.

It's one more reason to celebrate the harvest each year, and Midwesterners do it in several parts of our region.

At lively blueberry festivals, cooks roll out pies, muffins, ice cream and other creations packed with just-picked flavor. Each location creates its own specialties, from a blueberry dessert contest in Ely in far northern Minnesota, to Plymouth, Indiana, where festivalgoers sample blueberry-loaded milkshakes and cheesecakes. In Michigan, one festival even touts blueberry pizza.

With the growth of you-pick farms, customers have more opportunities to pick their own fresh produce and get a breath of country air, even if they live far from a northern woodland patch where the berries grow wild. At these commercial farms, long rows of lush bushes stretch with mown pathways in between. Almost hiding among the leaves, the blueberries await.

"A lot of people still like to get out in the woods to pick," Dave says. "It's just the whole romance that goes back to an earlier time before the berries were raised commercially. But at the farms, they avoid the forests' bugs and brambles."

The you-pick farms came into existence after the university began looking to develop additional agricultural crops and researchers began experimenting with cultivated berries. By 1983, the first commercial plantings were in the field.

All the better for those who want to get out and harvest for themselves.

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