Blueberry Month Means Harvest Time

July is National Blueberry Month and Upper Cumberland farmers are ready with the blueberry harvest.

Jeff Green owns Green Acres Farm with his family in Clarkrange. He said he believes picking blueberries is something families can enjoy doing together.

“Some folks will come and bring their children,” Green said. “They picked blueberries when they were young and they want their children to experience picking the blueberries.”

Dennis Clark of Clark Blueberry Farm in White County said he has noticed an increase in younger people picking this year.

“We found this year we have a lot of younger families bringing their children out,” Clark said. “It brings back memories. They said they remember when they were a child going out and helping pick maybe blackberries, strawberries, or blueberries. And they want their children have the same-type memory.”

Each farm have had different levels of success when it comes to production this year. Clark said he has had probably his best crop since he began growing and selling blueberries 11-years ago.

“Our crop has been amazing this year,” Clark said. “It’s been excellent. We’ve had more berries than we’ve ever had before.”

Meanwhile, Green said his farm lost around half its crop to frost. He said multiple days of damp weather was to blame.

“We had a really good spring,” Green said. “It looked like we were going to have an exceptional crop. Then we had three consecutive mornings of a late frost or freeze. It really has diminished our production this year. The variety I have is just now beginning to ripen, but the production looks like about half of a crop.”

National Blueberry Month was first recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in July 2003. According to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, the U.S. is the largest producer of blueberries. In 2016, fresh and processed blueberries generated over $720 million.

Both farmers said regardless of their crop sizes, they both have seen a higher demand for blueberries this year.

“It seems like the word is getting out, and we’ve had a lot of pickers this year,” Clark said. “We have on-farm sales, and we also have pick-your-own. We would rather have the pick-you-own people, but it’s been real good for us this year.”

Clark and Green both said they like blueberries, but they each came to enjoy them at different points in life. Green said he has fond memories of picking blueberries in his youth.

“When I was a child, I would go along the edges of our fields and hope to find a bush growing wild at he edge of the woods,” Green said.

Clark, on the other hand, said he did not start eating blueberries until shortly before he started farming them.

“I had never really eaten a blueberry until just a few years before we started having our berries produce,” Clark said. “I had eaten what I thought were blueberry muffins, but, come to find out, a lot of it was just flavoring and not really the blueberries themselves.”

According to the Blueberry Council, the peak season for blueberries in the U.S. runs between mid-June to mid-August.