Poking Around in Maine

A Day at the Blueberry Barrens
by Craig Mains

I had noticed in some of my previous ramblings around in Maine that the areas where the blueberries grew had developed some nice autumn foliage. I knew there was an area between Bangor and Columbia Falls on the coast where there was a huge expanse of blueberry barrens so I thought I'd go check it out. It was just me and the dog since it was Chain-Wen's work week. It was about an hour drive from Bangor.

The area I was aiming for was off of Maine State Route 193 near a little place called Deblois. I found the road I was looking for, which was called Baseline Road. Blueberry fields opened up almost to the horizon on the west side. It was the biggest expanse of flat land I'd seen in Maine that wasn't a bog or wetland of some sort.

It wasn't totally flat. It was interspersed in places with some woods and there were a few dips as well. However, one had the feeling of being on a plateau, which was exactly what it was. This is Baseline Road, which, for the most part, ran straight as an arrow.

Obviously these are not your mom and pop family blueberry farms. There are two companies that appeared to own most of the fields and are said to harvest about 95% of the annual crop of low-bush blueberries in the US. I could see sprinkler heads in the fields so they have some ability to irrigate them as needed. These fields have probably also been de-rocked. In places I could see rocks piled along the edge of the tree line, including some huge boulders.

The area is known for more than blueberries. Geologists know it as part of the Pineo Ridge Delta Complex, which is one of the largest "glacio-marine deltas" in the eastern US. Thousands of years ago this area was where the leading edge of the Laurentide glacier was in contact with the ocean. The ocean was further inland at the time because the weight of the glacier was so great that it compressed the underlying rocks as much as 500 feet, allowing the ocean to come further inland.

Glaciers, even when they are neither advancing nor receding are debris conveyor belts operating in slow motion. The glacial debris that is the plateau, which I've seen referred to as a grounding line moraine, was deposited underwater, probably under the canopy of an ice shelf as in the illustration above.

After the glacier receded and the weight was removed, the underlying rock strata rebounded and rose upward pushing the shoreline back to about its current position. Erosion and wave action created some gullies around the edges of the plateau.

There is a lot more going on geologically than what I am able to explain and it would have been nice to have someone along who could explain more exactly what I was looking at. Suffice it to say that geologists have a big interest in the area and universities sometimes bring students to the area on field trips.

The blueberries grow here because of the material that the glaciers deposited. I've seen the barrens referred to as "glacial outwash plains." The soil is mostly sand, often 20 or more feet deep, and acidic. It is an environment that is good for blueberries and not much else. Blueberries slowly colonized the barrens probably not long after the glaciers receded about 11,000 years ago. Initially the soil would have had no organic component but over the millenia that blueberries have been growing on the barrens a layer of organic material has accumulated.

Native Americans were present in Maine about 10,500 years ago and blueberries were a critical food resource for them. They made a pemmican type mixture of blueberries, seeds, and flaked dried fish or meat that was formed into bars and sun dried. They also made a pudding-like dish of blueberries mixed with dried ground corn and water. The Indians learned that if they occasionally burned the barrens every few years that they could eliminate the few other plants that competed with the blueberries and the blueberries grew back vigorously and were more productive.

Baseline Road is shown in the distance. It was an unpaved road that was maybe 10 or 12 miles long end to end. I spent about two hours driving along, stopping here and there to take pictures. Not a single car passed by.

Although they are now intensely cultivated, the low bush blueberries, Vaccinium augustifolium, are promoted as wild blueberries. In a sense this is true since they weren't planted---the plants that have been here for thousands of years are just continuing to be maintained.

I eventually got thoroughly lost---or at least misplaced. I had sketched out a little map of the area before I headed out. However, all of the roads were unpaved, few of the roads were marked at intersections, and the roads all looked pretty much the same. The public roads were often indistiquishable to me from some of the blueberry farm access roads.

I wasn't too concerned though since I knew if I kept heading roughly south I'd eventually intersect with US Route 1, which was what happened somewhere near Columbia Falls.

There was another place I was trying to get to but, because I got off track, I ended up taking a roundabout way to get there.

There were two patches of blueberry barrens that looked interesting to me because when I looked at them on Google Earth I could see they were in big boulder fields. I crossed this wetland area on the way to the first. There was a gate to the area, which was open, but there was a big sign saying "No Trespassing--Jasper Wyman & Son," which was one of the two big companies. There were some sentences about legal consequences. I decided to try the other spot, which took me a little while to find as it was down an unnamed road.

Jasper Wyman and Son goes back to 1874. The Wyman company now owns more than 10,000 acres of blueberry barrens in Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. They also buy blueberries from independent growers who are under contract with them.

I finally located the other spot. I didn't see any No Trespassing signs but I wasn't totally sure it was a public road either. I figured if someone came by they could always ask me to leave. No one did.

Growers today have built upon the knowledge of the Native Americans who harvested the wild blueberries. Instead of burning the fields they usually mow them every other year. After harvesting them, they mow them close to the ground. The following year the fields that were mowed push up new vegetative growth. By the end of the growing season they have developed buds. During the second year the plants flower and produce berries. Once they are harvested, the two-year cycle repeats. This means that growers, so that they have a crop every year, split their fields so that half are in the first year of the cycle and half in the second year.

In the photo above I think the field on the right of the road was harvested---probably in August. It has not yet been mowed. The mowed fields I saw were mowed down to within about an inch of the ground surface. The field on the left, I think, will be harvested next year.

There were almost certainly too many big boulders in these fields to try to de-rock them. That must make it harder to mow and harvest these fields compared to the ones on the plateau. It is increasingly more difficult to find enough workers to manually harvest blueberries so they are now mainly harvested mechanically.

The boulders weren't equally distributed. There seemed to be bigger boulders in the upper field and they were generally closer together. I noticed that in the area where they were most closely spaced that straw had been spread between the rocks. I think that this may mean they are planning to burn the harvested plants rather than mow them.

Burning the harvested bushes is something of an art. If the fire becomes too hot it can burn the organic soil that has formed over a long period of time. The straw helps keep the fire burning without getting too hot. I suspect that the grower decided in the area where there were a lot of big, closely spaced boulders that it was easier to burn than mow.

Glacial geologists think that the reason there are so many more boulders in this area than on the plateau is that at one point in time this area was under the ocean. It was however close to the edge of the plateau, which was above water. The glaciers deposited a mixture of particles of various sizes from silt and sand to immense boulders. The boulders here protruding above the ground surface were at one time probably covered with materials of smaller sizes. However, because this was at one time within the tidal zone the surf is believed to have washed away some of the smaller lighter material leaving behind the boulders that were too big and heavy to be moved.

The low bush blueberry can be spread by seed and also vegetatively. The bush sends out horizontal rhizomes underground. New stems grow vertically from the rhizomes. All of the plants growing from the same rhizome are genetically identical and are referred to as clones. A single clone can take up 75 to 250 square feet. One clone was measured at a half mile in length. It seems a clone could also be viewed as a single plant with many stems.

Within a field there are many clones and, although all the stems within a single clone are genetically identical, there are genetic differences between different clones in the same field. This results in slightly different times of flowering and differences in flavor and sweetness of the berries. I wondered if that also accounted for the difference in the color of the autumn foliage. There was a lot of color variation that seemed to be in patches and streaks which made me wonder if a patch of one color might indicate the area taken up by one clone.

The story of the low bush blueberry industry in Maine is one of increasing production on a decreasing amount of land. In 1951 Maine produced 15 million pounds of blueberries on 150,000 acres. By the 1970s Maine was producing 20 million pounds on 60,000 acres and in 2017 100 million pounds were produced on just 44,000 acreas.

The enhancement in productivity has been due to mowing every other year, fertilizing, irrigating when necessary, control of insects pests and competing vegetation, and bringing in beehives (up to a hive per acre) to maximize pollination.

In 1970 the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes began legal proceedings claiming that their tribal lands (which amounted to about two thirds of the land area of Maine) had been seized illegally 200 years prior by the state of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a part. When the suit was settled 12 years later the tribes received a settlement of 81.5 million dollars of which 54.5 million dollars was used to buy 300,000 acres of land.

The Passamaquoddy tribe used part of their settlement to buy a 2000-acre blueberry barren that they continue to manage in the traditional way. They burn the harvested bushes rather than mowing and hand harvest the berries. The Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company sells their berries to restaurants, stores, bakeries, and breweries.

After our lunch, the dog and I spent about two or three hours just walking around here. It was a partly cloudy day (and quite windy) so I had to frequently wait for a cloud to pass by so the fields would be sunlit in order to get a better photo.

I thought the rock on the right looked like it had giant fingerprint marks on it. I wonder what caused the indentations.

When the clouds obscured the sun the fields looked to be almost entirely a magenta color but when the sun came out the different shades of various other colors became more obvious.

I believe the mountain in the background is Tunk Mountain but I am not sure

We had the whole place to ourselves. Just like when we were on the plateau, no one came by while we were there. It was effectively a dead end road. There was a road around the perimeter of the field (blocked in one place by a downed tree) and a road that ran up the middle of the field, shown above.

Last view looking back before heading back to Bangor.

 

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