Michigan’s blueberry coast is ripe for the selecting

Blueberries wanted a champion, and Tiffany Balk was greater than as much as the duty.

Fifteen years in the past, Balk went to ship a present to a buddy in Chicago from her house in Grand Haven, Michigan.

Her husband prompt a field of dried cherries, the signature crop of the Traverse Metropolis space.

However Grand Haven is a few 150 miles south of Traverse Metropolis, west of Grand Rapids, on the japanese shore of Lake Michigan. Completely totally different space, completely totally different vibe, Balk advised her husband.

“Blueberries are to southwest Michigan like cherries are to northern Michigan,” she mentioned. As quickly as she heard herself, Balk realized she’d hit on a distinct segment enterprise.

Blueberries are certainly the little, spherical, cute, colourful crop that defines midsummer alongside the light dunes and broad seashores of the japanese coast of Lake Michigan. Like dried cherries, cranberries and raisins, dried blueberries add a jolt of taste in cookies, muffins and salads. Blueberries freeze fantastically, that means the crop can yield mix-ins for breads and muffins year-round.

So Balk bought to it. It was a specialty enterprise simply ready to be created.

Blueberry season usually blooms round July 4 and continues by the tip of August, with totally different varieties rolling into Michigan farm stands alongside Interstate Freeway 196, which hugs the lake from Indiana to Grand Haven.

You-pick farms provide a style of the backbreaking work of hand-raking blueberries. Each Michigan farmer’s market spills with baskets, buckets and bins of blueberries. Together with July marking Nationwide Blueberry Month, South Haven’s Nationwide Blueberry Pageant (blueberryfestival.com), set this yr for Aug. 11-14, is one other nice excuse to indulge with youngsters’s pie-eating contests, a parade and a pie social.

Blueberries love mild, sandy soil, which makes the seashores and bluffs of southwestern Michigan the right setting for rising the 110 million kilos of berries the state produced in 2020. That makes Michigan the main nationwide producer of cultivated blueberries, in keeping with the U.S. Division of Agriculture, with Washington, Oregon and Georgia trailing behind.

Maine leads in wild, or lowbush, berries, producing 102 million kilos in 2020.

Balk, 56, is now a part of the blueberry industrial complicated. Her retailer, Blueberry Haven (213 Washington Ave., Grand Haven; 616-935-7562; blueberry-haven.com) created a nucleus for an business that didn’t understand it wanted one. From downtown Grand Haven, she shares and sells (on-site and on-line) blueberry baking mixes, salsa, honey, all method of jams and pie fixings, and, after all, quite a lot of chocolate-covered dried blueberries. All of what she gives is made in Michigan, most of it proper in or round Grand Haven.

Rising up in northern Maine, her childhood was straight out of the traditional youngsters’s guide, “Blueberries for Sal,” by Robert McCloskey, through which a preschool blueberry thief and her bear equal are “all combined up on Blueberry Hill” whereas their respective moms are gathering berries to retailer up for winter.

“We used to go over to Machias and rake blueberries at my cousin’s farm,” she says, referring to a coastal city in Maine. “Within the summertime, should you had been poor, what did you do? You’d go rake blueberries.”

School introduced her to central Michigan, the place she met and married her husband and began a household. Working for a regional clothes retailer taught her the retail enterprise.

In search of a present that didn’t exist confirmed her what to promote. “There was no blueberry model,” Balk mentioned. As quickly as her youngest baby entered kindergarten, she arrange her firm and began making and promoting blueberry-centric merchandise on the native farmer’s market.

First got here a pancake combine. Then got here jam, then chocolate-covered blueberries.

When a storefront in downtown Grand Haven grew to become accessible in 2010, she and her husband went all in and purchased it. The shop opened in 2011.

It’s onerous to keep away from blueberries alongside the western coast of Michigan, however who would need to?

South of Grand Haven, Holland is studded with blueberry choices. Among the many finest: blueberry doughnuts on the two Bowerman Blueberry areas (You-pick and farm market, 15793 James St., Holland; Bowerman’s on eighth Cafe and Bakery, 2 E. eighth St., Holland; 616-738-3099; realblueberries.com), and S. Kamphuis (4140 148th Ave., Holland; 616-399-9545; skamphuisblueberries.com), the place you can also purchase frozen berries.

At Blueberry Haven, Balk finds no finish to blueberry every thing, from barbecue sauce to espresso. The bestseller? Chocolate-covered blueberries, however blueberry salsa is available in an in depth second.

And simply to ensure her Illinois clients really feel appreciated, particularly College of Illinois alumni and followers, Balk added a touch of orange to her model’s deep-blue labels.

Blueberries had been a staple for Indigenous American tribes who initially occupied what’s now often called the Midwest. Discovered as far south because the Mexican border and as far north as japanese Canada and Alaska, the 35 species of blueberries indigenous to North America had been an uncelebrated seasonal staple till a authorities botanist crafted cultivars that would maintain industrial farming, in keeping with Ryan Pankau, a horticulturist with the College of Illinois Extension in Urbana.

Discovery of their antioxidant properties vaulted blueberries from dessert ingredient to well being meals staple. It takes solely a ½ cup — 30 energy’ value — of recent blueberries to ship 25% of the really useful day by day quantity of vitamin C and three grams of dietary fiber, in keeping with the Mayo Clinic.

About half of the 690 million kilos of blueberries produced in 2020 had been bought recent, and the remaining had been processed, in keeping with the USDA.

Discover blueberry updates and occasions by the Grand Haven Conference and Guests’ Bureau (visitgrandhaven.com).

Seize a rake and comb by the branches for berries at you-pick farm; such farms for blueberries and all types of produce could be scouted at pickyourown.org.

Or decide up your berries at a Michigan farmers market (michigan.org/farmers-markets), finding one handy in your travels.

Joanne Cleaver is a contract author.