Was eating Canadian blueberries today as they're in season, and thought to read a little about blueberries and found this article discussing the super-sized Australian blueberries that were going around social media in recent years.
> The Eureka is no ordinary blueberry. It is large – often the width of a dollar coin.
Okay, what country's dollar? Australia? Canada? The USA? And if the USA, a Sacky, Tony, or Ike? Perhaps the Guardian is returning the favors of US journalists who insist on using measurement units of football fields, swimming pools, and 747s for length, volume, and mass. I expect we will soon see time measurements reported in coffee breaks, Youtube videos, or micro-Tik-Toks.
More to that is the author Nicole Hasham is an Australian environment and energy journalist | editor | correspondent for several Australian publications.
The UK Guardian sources a fair amount of material from Australian contributors.
Added to that, the Guardian has an (online-only) Australian edition, with staff based in Australia to help produce it. Decent chance this article was originally written for their Australian edition.
They have four online editions (UK, US, Australia, International). All four contain the same articles; the difference is basically in which articles are on the front page, and the hierarchy of their categorisation system (e.g. “UK Politics” is a top-level category for the UK edition, but buried deeper for the other three.) Certainly all three of the UK, US and Australia editions commission original content from local journalists designed to appeal to the interests of that country’s readers.
I mean... Yes, but IMO I think I'd be much more likely to carry a small amount of cash if I didn't have to worry about it converting into 10 different coins once I break the big note.
I'm not sure but it looks like it was 1988 for the coins, which is when the notes were removed, then 1996 for finalising the switch to polymer notes, with some earlier introductions.
I think whether it would help is somewhat complex because polymer notes do still wear out, and lower value notes have higher usage which makes them wear out faster. IIRC the main driver for polymer was security with durability as a nice side effect.
This link https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/sep/7.html says that median life for $5 notes is 3.5 years under one measurement system, which I would presume would be even lower for $1/$2 if we used them, since they'd get more frequent usage and less storage.
It should be possible to calculate the costs, savings, and lifetime of all the coin and note variations but that's a bit much for me right now :)
Given that the Ike hasn't been minted in 45 years, I think it is safe to say it is not that. The Sacky and Tony are exactly the same width, 26.5 mm. The Canadian dollar is also 26.5 mm (as are the Prezzies and the Innos, and why are we Infantilizing coins anyway). The Australian dollar is a touch smaller, 25 mm. So I think the answer to your question is "all of them", 1.5 mm is likely larger than the variation between blueberries.
Converting that to Library of Congresses or National Library of Austrailias is left as an exercise to the reader.
Change my mind: bilberries aka European blueberries (small, dark red/purple flesh) are superior to the American version (large, blue skin, but white and tasteless on the inside).
> (large, blue skin, but white and tasteless on the inside).
That's just farmed blueberries. Wild blueberries are smaller, with blue and much more flavourful insides. It's an unfortunate reality with grocery stores that since people buy based on looks, farms will optimize for what looks good rather than what tastes good.
They also optimize for transportation, which in the US tends to be very far indeed. Many kinds of fruit and veg are picked when they are just ripe, or not yet ripe and artificially ripened with ethylene or similar.
The sad state of grocery store tomatoes is a testament to optimizing for transportation. The best tasting ones blemish/spoil easily. The tougher ones usually sold in stores just don't have much flavor.
It's not even about optimizing for looks so much as size. A given blueberry bush will grow a certain _number_ of blueberries, while they are sold by weight. For that reason the farmer makes more money by getting the bush to grow the largest blueberries possible, and the larger ones tend to taste less good.
From my experience (with homegrown berries) I would disagree; it's probably just that farmers have to optimize for "will not go bad on the way to the store".
Maximum size and number of berries are determined by variety, and largely trade off against each other, though (probably climate dependent) some varieties just don't seem to do well at all.
Actual size and sweetness is determined by how much water you give them and how long you leave them on the bush. Optimal picking time is determined by: go down and see when you think they're ready, then wait 2 more weeks before actually picking them; there should be just a handful starting to go bad. With some (but not all) varieties, you can also go by feel: if barely touching the berry makes it fall off, it's ready.
If you only have a small number of bushes and they aren't fully enclosed, the birds will eat them all before they actually ripen. At commercial scale this isn't very significant since the area can't support that many birds for the rest of the summer.
>sweetness is determined by how much water you give them and how long you leave them on the bush
with wine grapes, sweetness (and other flavor qualities) depend on the sunlight times ratio of surface area of leaves to number of "berries". If the weather is great, you can grow more great grapes, but if the weather is poor you prune off half the fruit when it is still small and green (it's called the green harvest), and the remaining grapes come out higher quality, concentrating the sugar from more leaves.
You might try it with a blueberry bush to see if those fruits taste better.
No, it's a different species, vaccinium corymbosum. It's farmed, because it can be farmed, because of the bush size and growing conditions.
Wild European blueberries, vaccinium myrtillus, can't be farmed. If we could, we would, but we can't, so instead we employ hordes of seasonal workers to go out in the forests and harvest them during the month-long season.
Myrtillus is the bilberry. High-bush blueberries (corymbosum) are the farmed variety in North America and while there are wild high-bush varieties, wild blueberries most commonly referring to the smaller, sweeter, low-bush varieties.
Larger blueberries weigh more and so there is selective pressure and growing preferences which lead to large watery tasteless but heavy berries as the preference for crop outcomes.
Blueberries are enormously flavourful but I know what you mean in that occasionally I have come across blueberries that are seemingly grown for size and not taste, and seem bland and barely tart at all. (I've experienced the same with other fruit as well, such as strawberries)
But yea if you think blue berries are tasteless you need to get some actual good blueberries. Unfortunately you've been eating the bad stuff!
There are many different types of American blueberries. The Reka and the Blue Ray, for example, couldn't be more different. (I strongly prefer the Blue Rays, but I'll gladly pick Rekas when the season opens.)
Reka is an odd choice as an example of an American blueberry. While it's increasingly common to grow here, it was actually developed in New Zealand. "Reka" is named for the Maori word for "sweet". Which is also a little ironic, since they are one of the more tart blueberries. I like them, though!
It's sometimes called whortleberry or huckleberry in the US, although the latter in particular may refer to any of numerous berries.
Frozen berries are exported from Europe though and can probably be found in specialist shops, the French in particular are fond of them (myrtilles). The texture is unfortunately lost but the taste does come through quite well.
They are seasonal and picked wild so even in Sweden where the country is full of these berries, they are available fresh to buy for about a month per year.
I think they are picked and exported frozen from Poland and Sweden among other places.
In rural Poland it's a common seasonal activity to gather them in forests in July, you get whole family go to the forest for a few hours and gather enough to make 1 or 2 meals for the whole family (some people freeze them but it's not the same). Pierogi with "forest blueberries" is the quintessential summer food.
Some people make a business out of it, gather them whole day and sell them. But I've never seen them in malls, just in street markets and people selling them along the roads in season. I think they don't keep long enough for markets - you have to eat them by the day after the gathering.
We also have the "american blueberries", they are farmed industrially, and some people have them in their gardens (my grandparents for example). They are nice, but nowhere close to the real thing.
There's also 2 different species of wild forest berries, but I'm not sure how they are officially called in English (my grandmother called them "borówki" and "łochinie", but even in Poland it's regional names, most people don't know what a "łochinia" is :) ).
When buying frozen blueberries (forest blueberries of course) in Norway however, they are often marked as picked in Poland, so there is someone making a business out of it.
"Łochinia" seems to be the bog bilberry (Vaccinium uliginosum). They have a milder taste than bilberries. You sometimes find them in forests in Finland, but I've never seen anyone selling them.
These should be well known by nature people but I don't hear them discussed much.
Today, because of this discussion, searching for some info, I found this interesting trivia observation someone blogged about: you can use bog bilberry to clean the color off your bilberry blue fingers. The explanation likely being that they are slightly acidic (it's hard to remove with just water and soap.)
There's "jagoda", "borówka" and "łochinia" and the mapping from names to fruits switch in every region :). My grandma called bog billberies - "borówka", and "łochinie" were smaller, elongated blueberries with slightly green insides. They were less sweet and more tart than regular "jagoda".
I think this is what she called "łochinia", but it grew in the forest so I'm not sure:
I don't know, they aren't even sold in Europe in markets AFAIK (we only get "American blueberries" here). They can't be domesticated, people gather them in forests.
When the berries are in season you can sometimes buy them at regular supermarkets or for sure at farmers markets.
They are quite intensively harvested in countries like Finland, Sweden, Poland and Belarus. The frozen berries are then exported.
For instance where I live (Austria) I can buy frozen Bilberries at a much cheaper price than regular Blueberries.
Yes frozen can be found (in french speaking regions - myrtilles sauvages) and they are the right kind, meaning same as forest kind. But the ones I can get are quite sour.
If you think this is the worst offender, compare real tiny forest strawberries with that bland stuff from grocery stores. 5% of the volume, 300% of the taste. Even good ripe homegrown ones pale in comparison. Had a hike last weekend and hit the right spot of altitude and their ripeness, got stuck for an hour just nibbling on them along forest roads.
I'm in Europe (Norway), and I can get the small blueberries in the stores... at the right time of year. I haven't seen them yet this year, but I will soon.
Folks go into the forests and harvest them, selling them to the stores. Similar story with cloudberries. They go for a fairly nice price. (They sell local produce in the major grocery stores here)
The rest of the year, though, large blueberries are all that are on offer if you are buying fresh. IIRC, I can buy both smaller and larger blueberries if I buy frozen.
I have gotten blåbär (bilberries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinium_myrtillus) at markets in Sweden. You can get frozen, picked-from-the-forest blåbär at e.g. Coop or Ica. There are also products in Sweden that list Vaccinium myrtillus rather than American blueberries as the ingredient, though they are not as noticeably better than blueberries when all sugared up and as just one of many ingredients.
There was an airline that serves or at least used to serve blåbär juice in-flight in or to/from Sweden. I don't remember if it was like SAS or BRA, but one of them did. Kind of an expensive way to get a taste.
Usually I just go to the forest myself. The wikipedia article says that they grow in quite a number of places around the world. In northern Sweden, they are everywhere, and you have the absolute right to harvest them for personal use, AFAIK.
You could take a drive up here to the Northeast USA in late Summer. Lots of low-bush blueberry farms let you pick your own using a berry rake. The flavor is usually pretty intense.
I spent yesterday picking a bunch, got maybe 4kg, gonna make jam today and bring home with me to the US. Absolutely superior. Worth the time and effort every time.
There's a reason all blueberry preserves, AFAIK, use the former. I can't imagine what the latter would taste like. Doesn't seem appealing. But I will also admit I have come across more flavorful batches of the latter, but still not preserve material.
I was in Scandinavia recently and the strawberries there were much smaller than the typically massive American ones and the flavor was sweeter, the texture was less firm and the seeds were much less pronounced.
Does that mean that these blueberries don’t need 400+ hours of frost to fruit?
That’s the primary obstacle to growing them here in California and I’m really curious if they bred the frost requirement out of the Eureka blueberries, or if Australia is colder than I thought. I’d kill to experiment with growing my own because the blueberries sold here are nothing like the wild blueberries from my childhood
20 days of below zero temperatures though? Wikipedia lists Lismore’s record low temperature as -3 C and an average low of 6.5 C in the depth of winter. That’s way too hot for blueberries to fruit. I figured inland Australia got significantly colder but without the rainfall to support blueberries.
The farm does have Mountain in the name though so I assume they grow at a higher altitude, but I grow at a significant altitude in California too and it doesn’t drop the temperature enough, at least in high desert climates.
Still seems like they've made some progress on reducing frost requirements.
> Still seems like they've made some progress on reducing frost requirements.
Most likely, it's just that the common assumption is that all of Australia is hot and miserable, whereas not all of it is. They're not actually in Lismore, they're near it.
My blueberries fruited without needing frost (we get none where I am in South East Queensland); it's definitely been bred out of them as a requirement I think?
> My blueberries fruited without needing frost (we get none where I am in South East Queensland); it's definitely been bred out of them as a requirement I think?
That’s awesome!
Do you know what varieties you have? Did you buy seeds online or get plants from a nursery?
The Northern Rivers area (where Lismore is) has a lot of gullys and valleys, whereas the towns there tend to occupy flatter areas. Winter in the gullys gets bloody cold. The official temperature in Lismore is measured at the Post Office. I grew up in the Northern Rivers, and saw frost most years in the gullys and on the slopes of our farm. We were closer to the coast than Lismore, so they'd get more frosts than we did.
Chill hours I thought were anything under 10 degrees (Celsius, of course), but I gather officially it's probably closer to 7 or 8 degrees. Sub-zero isn't necessary, in any case.
You're right that they've doubtless been selecting for quite a while at their site - and will therefore have varieties that are happy with chill hours for the region.
Though I'm surprised they get as cold as -3 given how far north, and how close to the coast (20km) they are.
Lismore - to their west, away from the coast - has an elevation of only ~10 metres. The township they're closer looks to be Wollongbar, and that's showing as ~160 metres elevation. I believe the soil around there is superb (volcanic, not depleted like 'average Australian farming land') which is probably a bigger factor.
I'm south of them by 4 degrees, same elevation, and have Much Optimism for my half dozen new blueberry plans ... once I get them out of pots. Shame that these Eurekas plants don't seem to be for sale.
EDIT: meant to add - some varieties that are popular here in AU - Sharpe Blue, Biloxi - have low chill hour requirements, around 300-400 say, BUT really don't like frosts, so it's quite the juggle.
They grow warm-climate blueberry varieties commercially in this sub-tropical coastal region (Coffs Harbour). No frost. The ones in my garden fruit quite happily.
The reason you're seeing blueberries year-round in stores is due to a huge improvement in naturally hybridizing commercial blueberries to remove this requirement for frost and chill hours. The industry owes a big debt mainly to U of Florida's Dr. Lyrene for discovering blueberries that could fruit without the need for a winter. https://floridaaghalloffame.org/2011/11/dr-paul-lyrene/ You'll have good luck with any of his varieties in California.
Ha, I had a chance to work in the "blueberry world" over a decade ago. Ridley's blueberries are bred for flavor first and truly are exceptional. Most of the comments are correct, generally fruit is grown for looks first, yield second, and spoilage third. Flavor doesn't even factor in.
If you're in N America, here's the farmer that grows his cultivars: https://familytreefarms.com/fruit/blueberries/ Best chance of finding them in stories is during the March-April window in the US.
I ate what i think were wild blueberries on a hike last year (late August, Mt. Dickerman in Washington). They were smaller, wine colored, sweet, and tart. I liked them a lot more than store bought blueberries which I actually don’t like eating.
I think store bought are good in blended shakes but mostly because they add sweetness.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadOkay, what country's dollar? Australia? Canada? The USA? And if the USA, a Sacky, Tony, or Ike? Perhaps the Guardian is returning the favors of US journalists who insist on using measurement units of football fields, swimming pools, and 747s for length, volume, and mass. I expect we will soon see time measurements reported in coffee breaks, Youtube videos, or micro-Tik-Toks.
More to that is the author Nicole Hasham is an Australian environment and energy journalist | editor | correspondent for several Australian publications.
The UK Guardian sources a fair amount of material from Australian contributors.
They have four online editions (UK, US, Australia, International). All four contain the same articles; the difference is basically in which articles are on the front page, and the hierarchy of their categorisation system (e.g. “UK Politics” is a top-level category for the UK edition, but buried deeper for the other three.) Certainly all three of the UK, US and Australia editions commission original content from local journalists designed to appeal to the interests of that country’s readers.
Coins are such a pain in the ass, but $1/2 is enough that I don't just want to refuse the change to avoid the inconveniences of carrying coins.
I have to assume that a polymer $1/2 wouldn't have this issue?
I think whether it would help is somewhat complex because polymer notes do still wear out, and lower value notes have higher usage which makes them wear out faster. IIRC the main driver for polymer was security with durability as a nice side effect.
This link https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/sep/7.html says that median life for $5 notes is 3.5 years under one measurement system, which I would presume would be even lower for $1/$2 if we used them, since they'd get more frequent usage and less storage.
It should be possible to calculate the costs, savings, and lifetime of all the coin and note variations but that's a bit much for me right now :)
Converting that to Library of Congresses or National Library of Austrailias is left as an exercise to the reader.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilberry
That's just farmed blueberries. Wild blueberries are smaller, with blue and much more flavourful insides. It's an unfortunate reality with grocery stores that since people buy based on looks, farms will optimize for what looks good rather than what tastes good.
Maximum size and number of berries are determined by variety, and largely trade off against each other, though (probably climate dependent) some varieties just don't seem to do well at all.
Actual size and sweetness is determined by how much water you give them and how long you leave them on the bush. Optimal picking time is determined by: go down and see when you think they're ready, then wait 2 more weeks before actually picking them; there should be just a handful starting to go bad. With some (but not all) varieties, you can also go by feel: if barely touching the berry makes it fall off, it's ready.
If you only have a small number of bushes and they aren't fully enclosed, the birds will eat them all before they actually ripen. At commercial scale this isn't very significant since the area can't support that many birds for the rest of the summer.
with wine grapes, sweetness (and other flavor qualities) depend on the sunlight times ratio of surface area of leaves to number of "berries". If the weather is great, you can grow more great grapes, but if the weather is poor you prune off half the fruit when it is still small and green (it's called the green harvest), and the remaining grapes come out higher quality, concentrating the sugar from more leaves.
You might try it with a blueberry bush to see if those fruits taste better.
If you remove all the excess water from farmed blueberries, the taste is about the same. You just need to aggressively sweat them.
This obviously doesn’t work if you want to eat them fresh, but there are better berries for eating fresh anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huckleberry
No, it's a different species, vaccinium corymbosum. It's farmed, because it can be farmed, because of the bush size and growing conditions.
Wild European blueberries, vaccinium myrtillus, can't be farmed. If we could, we would, but we can't, so instead we employ hordes of seasonal workers to go out in the forests and harvest them during the month-long season.
Larger blueberries weigh more and so there is selective pressure and growing preferences which lead to large watery tasteless but heavy berries as the preference for crop outcomes.
It's all about ROI.
Blueberries are enormously flavourful but I know what you mean in that occasionally I have come across blueberries that are seemingly grown for size and not taste, and seem bland and barely tart at all. (I've experienced the same with other fruit as well, such as strawberries)
But yea if you think blue berries are tasteless you need to get some actual good blueberries. Unfortunately you've been eating the bad stuff!
Frozen berries are exported from Europe though and can probably be found in specialist shops, the French in particular are fond of them (myrtilles). The texture is unfortunately lost but the taste does come through quite well.
I think they are picked and exported frozen from Poland and Sweden among other places.
Some people make a business out of it, gather them whole day and sell them. But I've never seen them in malls, just in street markets and people selling them along the roads in season. I think they don't keep long enough for markets - you have to eat them by the day after the gathering.
We also have the "american blueberries", they are farmed industrially, and some people have them in their gardens (my grandparents for example). They are nice, but nowhere close to the real thing.
There's also 2 different species of wild forest berries, but I'm not sure how they are officially called in English (my grandmother called them "borówki" and "łochinie", but even in Poland it's regional names, most people don't know what a "łochinia" is :) ).
Today, because of this discussion, searching for some info, I found this interesting trivia observation someone blogged about: you can use bog bilberry to clean the color off your bilberry blue fingers. The explanation likely being that they are slightly acidic (it's hard to remove with just water and soap.)
https://www.godt.no/aktuelt/i/eK1GOO/baeret-som-fjerner-blaa...
These berries have many names in scanidinavia too, but in norwegian I would know them as «skinntryte».
I think this is what she called "łochinia", but it grew in the forest so I'm not sure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonicera_caerulea
They are quite intensively harvested in countries like Finland, Sweden, Poland and Belarus. The frozen berries are then exported. For instance where I live (Austria) I can buy frozen Bilberries at a much cheaper price than regular Blueberries.
If you think this is the worst offender, compare real tiny forest strawberries with that bland stuff from grocery stores. 5% of the volume, 300% of the taste. Even good ripe homegrown ones pale in comparison. Had a hike last weekend and hit the right spot of altitude and their ripeness, got stuck for an hour just nibbling on them along forest roads.
Folks go into the forests and harvest them, selling them to the stores. Similar story with cloudberries. They go for a fairly nice price. (They sell local produce in the major grocery stores here)
The rest of the year, though, large blueberries are all that are on offer if you are buying fresh. IIRC, I can buy both smaller and larger blueberries if I buy frozen.
There was an airline that serves or at least used to serve blåbär juice in-flight in or to/from Sweden. I don't remember if it was like SAS or BRA, but one of them did. Kind of an expensive way to get a taste.
Usually I just go to the forest myself. The wikipedia article says that they grow in quite a number of places around the world. In northern Sweden, they are everywhere, and you have the absolute right to harvest them for personal use, AFAIK.
The only advantage is that the American ones are easier to grow in your garden and easier to gather.
That’s the primary obstacle to growing them here in California and I’m really curious if they bred the frost requirement out of the Eureka blueberries, or if Australia is colder than I thought. I’d kill to experiment with growing my own because the blueberries sold here are nothing like the wild blueberries from my childhood
The farm does have Mountain in the name though so I assume they grow at a higher altitude, but I grow at a significant altitude in California too and it doesn’t drop the temperature enough, at least in high desert climates.
Still seems like they've made some progress on reducing frost requirements.
Most likely, it's just that the common assumption is that all of Australia is hot and miserable, whereas not all of it is. They're not actually in Lismore, they're near it.
My blueberries fruited without needing frost (we get none where I am in South East Queensland); it's definitely been bred out of them as a requirement I think?
That’s awesome!
Do you know what varieties you have? Did you buy seeds online or get plants from a nursery?
You're right that they've doubtless been selecting for quite a while at their site - and will therefore have varieties that are happy with chill hours for the region.
Though I'm surprised they get as cold as -3 given how far north, and how close to the coast (20km) they are.
Lismore - to their west, away from the coast - has an elevation of only ~10 metres. The township they're closer looks to be Wollongbar, and that's showing as ~160 metres elevation. I believe the soil around there is superb (volcanic, not depleted like 'average Australian farming land') which is probably a bigger factor.
I'm south of them by 4 degrees, same elevation, and have Much Optimism for my half dozen new blueberry plans ... once I get them out of pots. Shame that these Eurekas plants don't seem to be for sale.
EDIT: meant to add - some varieties that are popular here in AU - Sharpe Blue, Biloxi - have low chill hour requirements, around 300-400 say, BUT really don't like frosts, so it's quite the juggle.
I got some bixoli and sharp blues and they fruit like crazy, where we are lucky to get a few days of frost per year
https://www.internationalblueberry.org/2018/03/28/eureka-thr...
International Blueberry is “a global organization bringing together leaders from around the blueberry world in all segments of the industry”
The ‘blueberry world’. What’ll they think of next!?
If you're in N America, here's the farmer that grows his cultivars: https://familytreefarms.com/fruit/blueberries/ Best chance of finding them in stories is during the March-April window in the US.
How does wild American blueberries taste? Anyone tried?
I think store bought are good in blended shakes but mostly because they add sweetness.