Blueberries Are Here

We have grown used to the abundance of all kinds of fruit all of the time, regardless of the season. Apples year-round, not just in the fall. Mangos in the dead of winter.

New Jersey's blues with attitude.

Pamela Mount with her blueberries at Terhune Orchards

It’s good to have. But let us not forget the taste of local fruit, freshly picked. 

Go get blueberries. It’s the start of New Jersey’s blueberry season, and your supermarket should have plenty.

Our varieties somehow look more real than the imported kind. The latter are uniformly dark blue little orbs. Suspiciously perfect looking. Jersey blueberries usually have a silvery or purplish sheen, and they are kind of squashed at the top and bottom.

“It’s a natural finish,” says Pamela Mount, of Terhune Orchards in Princeton. These blueberries have that Jersey attitude. Sweeter yet at the same time more acidic than your average blueberry.

Blueberries are a South Jersey original. They existed only as wild plants until 1916, when Elizabeth Coleman, working in the village of Whitesbog, figured a way for farmers to cultivate them. The state remains a leading producer, with a record crop last year of 54 million pounds.

The season is short. “We go to mid- or late July depending in how warm it is or if it rains,” Mount says. Down near the Pine Barrens, in the blueberry’s original home, the season lasts a little longer. Come August, though, it’s over. There is a window of only about one month before we are back to those overly good looking, bland, non-Enn-Jay blueberries.

But we are at the start of the season. Terhune is having a blueberry festival Saturday and Sunday to kick things off  with “everything blueberry,” says Mount. “Blueberry salsa, blueberry pie,  blueberry biscuits, blueberry iced tea, blueberry barbecue sauce.” Plus the fruit itself, pick your own.

There are also blueberry festivals this weekend in Hammonton, the “Blueberry capital of the world,” and at Whitesbog, where Elizabeth Coleman started it all.

Tags: Pine Barrens | South Jersey | Hammonton | Terhune Orchards | blueberries | blueberry picking | Whitesbog | Coleman, Elizabeth

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