Wild Blueberries: Where to Search in the Great Lakes Region

For centuries, Native Americans dwelling around the Great Lakes region of North America knew how to locate the best of the wild blueberry patches. Blueberries, both dried and fresh, were a staple in their diets and were also used as medicine. Samuel de Champlain noted this berry harvesting as early as 1615 during his travels through the Lake Huron area. Only recently, these berries have been rediscovered as the beneficial fruit they are. If you can't grow blueberries at home and are outraged by the price you must pay in the grocery store for a tiny container of berries, you can always learn how to find blueberries in the wild. Blueberries can be either lowbush (Vaccinium angustifolium) or highbush (Vaccinium corymbosum). The lowbush variety are considered the wild blueberries and are native to North America while the highbush blueberries have several cultivars. Blueberry lovers seem to agree on what tastes better, and those are found in the wild. My parents took my brother and me blueberry picking every year I was growing up. I know the areas where we found them and the areas we did not.

Where the blueberry patch had trees growing around it, the trees were generally jack pine and not red or Norway pine. There is a good reason for this. Jack pine tends to grow tall and straight with little bushiness. They provide the right amount of indirect sunlight for the low lying blueberry vines. They prefer the same acidic soil as wild blueberries and are often the first pines to grow in an area after a fire has swept through. Red or Norway pine requires a richer, more fertile soil than wild blueberries and jack pines. When young, Norway pines are bushy, which is why they are nice as Christmas trees. They can form dense forest and block sunlight from the blueberry vines. The needles make the soil too acidic for the patch. Norway pines grow in older growth forests.

Search for wild blueberries in locations which have had a forest fire. They are often one of the first kinds of vegetation, along with jack pines, to grow in a burned over area. After one or two years, the vines will produce even better than before the fire. One of the reasons a patch will re-establish itself after a fire is that the plants spread by means of underground rhizomes. An entire patch of blueberries may have one common ancestor. Fires destroy other vegetation, allowing the underground rhizomes to spread out. Mosses, wintergreen plants, and ferns tend to grow in the same areas as wild blueberries. All of these plants grow better when a certain amount of moisture is maintained in the soil.

Wild blueberries require a certain amount of sunlight but not too much. Search for them under low growing foliage like ferns or grasses by a weedy pond. These types of foliage provide the right combination of light and shade for the berries to ripen.

In your search for berries, do not overlook the eastern or southeastern facing areas of rocky slopes. Old logging areas or farmsteads which have been cleared and abandoned often produce patches of wild blueberries.

You must also consider weather conditions to determine whether a berry search is worth your time. Though wild blueberries are hardy in temperatures to fifty below zero Fahrenheit, a colder winter with very little or no snow cover prevents the vines from producing as many berries. Adequate snow cover protects the roots from a deep killing frost and, when spring comes, gives the moisture for plump berries.

In the same way, a last hard frost in the late spring may kill off the blueberry blossoms, making pollination and a subsequent berry crop, less likely. Enough rain must fall during the spring and summer while the berries are growing and ripening. Wild blueberries need a consistently moist soil in which to grow.

The amount of rainfall during the growing season and colder temperatures affect how long the berry bushes produce berries, how many berries are produced, and how big and juicy the berries are. The picking season varies from region to region but is usually from mid-July to early August.

While not revealing exactly where the wild blueberry patches are located, I can tell you that I have found berries in past years in these spots:

Northwestern Wisconsin
Moquah Barrens
Island Lake area, north of Spooner
Wascott/Gordon

Northeastern Minnesota
Brimson
Palisade Head on Lake Superior's North Shore

Please be sure that you are picking berries on county, state, or national public lands. Do not pick on private land without the owner's permission. If a patch looks like something rolled around in it, a bear has probably been there before you. Sit in the patch to pick if you must but try to take care not to crush any berry plants.

Once you have searched for and found your own prolific patch, try to keep its exact location a secret so you can return year after year. That is part of the fun of picking your own wild blueberries.