Wild about the Wild Blueberry Festival!

We are way behind in getting travel posts published this summer because we're having too much fun traveling! So we won't be confused about when each "wandering" happened, we'll start each blog with its actual date.

August 20, 2022

We have been in Maine for almost two weeks now, and we are still having a hard time getting used to the humidity here. After our late kayak trip last night, Mark laid the kayak out to dry at our camp site. The next morning the dew was so heavy that it was wetter than when we first took it out of the lake. It's hard to get things dried out around here! Our campground near Acadia National Park was our last one with full hook-ups for a while. So we finished up all the laundry before we got on the road to our last campground on the coast. We pulled into Sunset Point Campground in the afternoon, and we were assigned the best site ever! We have a view of the bay through our big windshield. Sunset Point gets a 9.6 rating (out of a possible 10), and now we understand why. This is one of the highest rated campgrounds of the last seven and a half years. Besides a great location, the owner is very nice, and goes out of his way to make his visitors welcome.

Besides liking the campground, we also love this area of Maine. This is the furthest north and east we will be this summer. It's off the usual tourist trek, as few people travel further than Acadia National Park. They call this area "Downeast Maine" and it is home to an area known as the "Blueberry Barrons." We were excited to see large fields of wild blueberries growing along the roads. What a fun place this is going to be! In fact, we started the fun as soon as we got the motor home settled into its beautiful camp site.

We headed down beside those fields of wild blueberries to a special tour this afternoon. We drove to a blueberry farm, and were greeted by blue skies, tall fluffy clouds, and an eagle circling overhead.

We were at the Welch Family Wild Blueberry Farm for the 1:00 tour, and we were joined by lots of other guests today.

The matriarch of the family led the tour. She told us the history of this 64 acres of land that her great grandfather bought and then cleared the trees. He then brought in sheep that ate everything in front of them--except for the naturally occurring wild blueberry plants. Almost by accident, he started a fruit farm that is still going four generations later. She is holding up a blueberry rake that is used for hand-harvesting these tiny berries.

Besides listening to her very interesting information, we were also entertained by her five-year-old grandson. He headed out into the field with his rubber boots, blueberry rake, and a basket for the fruit. If he continues his love of the wild blueberry harvest, he will be the sixth generation on this farm. The owner said that her best childhood memories were of raking blueberries with her family, and playing in the shade of the truck while her parents raked. Now because of national child labor laws, they can no longer hire families to help on the farm.

We had to learn the proper technique for harvesting these wild berries that grow close to the ground. The secret is running the rake very near and parallel to the soil.

When you have a nice group of berries in the tines of the rake, you lift up. That separates the fruit from the bush. As you can tell from our stances, this is a back-breaking posture for wild blueberry harvesting.

After several passes over the bushes, we took a picture of our harvest. Then they were dumped into the crate. A good raker can fill 150-200 large containers in a day, and gets paid $3 per box. Let's just say that we are not good rakers, and we shouldn't quit our day jobs--especially since we don't have day jobs.

Denisa has picked wild blueberries on hikes all over the country. But she has never seen them this crowded on a bush. They don't have any irrigation to water the blueberry plants during a dry summer like this one. But she explained that since they are only a mile from the coast, the morning dew is very heavy. We have experienced that heavy dew when trying to dry out a kayak. 

While they have 64 acres of blueberries, they only harvest half of that each summer. Most of the 32 acres this summer will be harvested with a tractor. We watched as that process was happening up the hill from us. While we love the red color of the blueberry plants, we weren't seeing that color here. We found out that an invasive grass is thriving in their blueberry fields this summer. So we got the color of the golden grass as we looked up the hill at the tractor harvest.

The tractor is driven by her father, with a cousin riding behind on the harvester. This unique harvester can rake much faster than hand-raking, but more of the berries will be crushed. So the tractor-harvested berries must be sold to the company down the road that uses them for juice or jam. They pointed out that the Welch's of the Welch wild blueberry farm were not related to the Welch's grape juice empire.

The hand harvested blueberries are put in wooden crates, and carried into the packing shed. At this point they still have lots of leaves and stems attached.

Inside the shed they have a winnower that gets rid of most of the debris . . .

before the berries are sent though a blower and then pushed onto a conveyer belt to be sorted by hand.

The shriveled or bruised berries are removed in this last step. Only the best wild blueberries will make it to the end of the conveyer belt where they will drop into the empty containers. These premium berries sell for $4 for a pint, and $8 for a quart. It takes a lot of berries to make a pint because these wild berries are so tiny. They are a fraction of the size of the domestic berries that you buy at the grocery store.

You might have noticed that most of the blueberry sorters have white hair. These two ladies are proud to say that they are 92 and 91. They have seen a few blueberries in their life times.

After our very interesting one-hour blueberry farm tour, we drove a couple miles toward the ocean for a stop at our first Maine State Park. 

The beach at Roque Bluffs State Park wasn't exactly glamorous, but it was very natural. This is what the beaches in Downeast Maine look like. We took a short walk on the sand, glad to have shoes because of all the pebbles.

This is a working fisherman's bay, with lots of boats in the water.

But our real destination for the day was the town down the road. Machias, Maine, is hosting the Wild Blueberry Festival this weekend, complete with hundreds of vendors in locations scattered across town and live music at the park.

We walked down to the Middle River for the reenactment of the Battle of the Rim. Actors in costume were telling the story of one of the earliest battles of the American Revolution.

When a boat-load of British red coats paddled their long boat up the river, our pioneer militia had to defend the rim against enemy invasion. Whew! That was a close call!

For lunch, we enjoyed barbecue from one of the food trucks. But the food highlight of the festival was the wild blueberry crisp with ice cream. We were sure that an entire pint of wild berries was in our piece, and we now know how hard they are to harvest.

We stayed in Machias until 6:00, when the Wild Blueberry Ball started in the Bad Little Falls Park. From the dance floor we could see the little falls that didn't look that bad to us.

A local band entertained, and we were surprised to see lots of people on the dance floor. We've become accustomed to being the only couple dancing at most musical gatherings here in the northeast.

We stayed until sunset, when the dance floor actually got too crowded.

On the way back to our bay-side campground, we met a truck with a load of wild blueberries. This is big business here in Downeast Maine. It was a great day with all the things we love about local festivals--we had vendors, good food, an interesting tour, topped off with live music and a dance. We are just wild about the Machias Wild Blueberry Festival!