Blueberry

a low berry-producing shrub. Blueberries are much confused with huckleberries, whortleberries, and bilberries. The blueberry is a member of the heath family, hence a relative of the marsh cranberry, wintergreen, bearberry, trailing arbutus, ling, laurel, and pyrola. There are many blueberries. The blueberry of the market is the fruit of a bush (Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum) from six to sixteen inches high that grows on dry, sandy hills from New Jersey northward to the Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. Many thousand acres in the mountain and waste districts of New York and New Jersey, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New England are abandoned to blueberry bushes. The blueberry industry of Maine is systematized most thoroughly. Blueberry tracts are laid off in leases. One third of each lease is burned over annually to renew the bushes and clear the ground. The burning is done at a season when the roots are not injured. August is blueberry harvest time. Pickers work by the quart. The fruit is put up in quart boxes and crated for shipment to market, or else taken in bulk baskets to nearby canning establishments. The owner of the land expects one-half cent per quart as rental. Pickers expect from one and one-half to three cents. The season before a tract is to be burned, when injury to the bushes is of no importance, a berry rake is often used to gather the berries. It looks much like a deep dust pan with a rake-like bottom of teeth, like those of a comb. The mass of twigs, leaves, and berries thus collected is run through a sort of fanning mill to blow out the trash. As at present managed, the part of the blueberry crop of the United States now gathered may be worth, all sections considered, half a million dollars. It is altogether probable that, with an increasing demand for fruit, the blueberry barrens of the old pineries may become exceedingly valuable. See Heath; Cranberry; Wintergreen; Arbutus