Taking Advantage of Peak Blueberry Season

Here in GA, blueberries are usually at their most available and least costly a couple of weeks on either side of July 4th. Sometimes there's another period of similar pricing in mid-August.  While fresh ones can be had year-round, and are readily available from about April through September, they can be expensive outside of peak North American production months.  What's showing up now are berries from New Jersey; recently it was North Carolina; before that it was Georgia and Florida; soon it will be Michigan.  Georgia, btw, is the biggest producer of blueberries in the country (at least in 2014, but production has been ramping up a lot in the last few years).

For me, 2014 was a good year, too--my five rabbiteye blueberry bushes produced 20 pounds.  This year, about a handful.  In late March, it dropped to about 24 degrees when the plants were nearly in
full bloom.  I tried hosing them down at 4 am, to no avail.

So I'm on the blueberry market this year.  I like them and eat a fair amount.  If you want them year-round, it makes sense to stock up now.  While you can get them later, you can end up paying more than shown at right for less than half as many. That's what they were going for at Sam's Club yesterday.

If you buy now, you need to preserve them somehow.  The easiest is freezing, and I froze about 6 pounds' worth today (and froze the same last summer from my own bushes).  I use frozen ones for pies.  Another way is to make preserves, which I also did last year.  And they can be dehydrated.

Dehydrating is pretty easy.  I pick over them to pull out the moldy ones (sometimes that isn't an issue, but it often is with store-bought berries), wash them, dump them onto a dehydrator tray, and subject them to a 135-degree breeze for two days.  What's left is a pile of shriveled berries dry enough to keep without molding in the container.

Some people recommend poking each berry with a toothpick, and you can see why at the right.  Some of them end up looking like little balloons--however, they will still dry out even if not pricked.  That's too much time and effort, and if I tried to do it, I'd still miss some.  I shy away from methods that require intensive handling or processing whenever possible.


One does have to be careful to check to be sure they are really dried out.  I did lose a whole container of berries one time to mold because I didn't get them sufficiently dehydrated.  So I'm a little paranoid about it now.

Some fruits I do not particularly like when dehydrated, but blueberries are okay.  I probably prefer fresh ones, but this is definitely a case of constrained optimization: is a dehydrated blueberry worth at least 40% of a fresh one?  At times, that's the price differential.

It took me a while to get into the swing of various food preservation methods, and I'm still learning new ones (plus learning which ones don't work).  With my own trees, bushes, and garden, it's a must, but it makes sense sometimes with store-bought produce, as well.