{Travel Canada} Blueberry Fields forever! Or: Where the Wild Blueberries live.

I 10,000 feet above the clouds - somewhere over the Atlantic between Canada and Europe: the plane is dark and most people are sleeping. Not me. Although I've gone to great lengths, I can not really pack the time difference of a whimsical 5 hours. Every night the same game. Panic brain to Mel: "It's 9 o'clock in the morning, you overslept and urgently need to work !!! I'll spill out a bit of adrenaline, sweetie. To get you on your feet. "Awake and sour mel to brain:" It's 4:00 in the morning in Canada and I do not have to do anything now. "What can I say. My brain is stubborn and wakes me up every night on time. Since it does not like to jump over his shadow. I feel very old and very inflexible. By the way, my bags too.

While we fly fast through the endless expanse to Europe back to the usual time zone, I let the last five days pass me by again. Was that really only five? It seems more like half a life. Our little Bloggerreisegruppe has seen a great deal, with the car once just covered 1,200 Kilomater in Nova Scotia, met incredibly relaxed nice people and lonesome landscapes so to speak. We were #blueberrybloggers on Mission Wild Blueberries at the invitation of the Canadian Blueberry Assosiation.

5 days ago. The first encounter with the wild blueberries literally falls into the water. On the way to the Blueberry Field, the rain patters so hard on the windscreens of our huge black vans that you can not see anything for long minutes. Neither the street nor anything. From time to time you can briefly guess the headlights of a car coming in - then there is deluge again. It fits in with what I've seen so far from Canada: insanely straight and wide highways, big cars, huge trucks, huge trailers, endless forests - and I'm not talking about the little playground forest around the corner - I mean WOODS. Everything is at least 10 to 20 numbers larger than you know it. Also the rain. Wilderness and primal forces for a quiff from Central Europe. It does not surprise me at all that bears and elks are regularly present at bedtime at any back door.

At some point we will then stand with the Vans in the nowhere on a rainy field with colorful boxes and small, wiry plants. Finally ... there they are! The wild blueberries. But somehow I had imagined them differently. I was thinking of big, magnificent bushes bending under the weight of thousands of bulging berries. I naive things.

Wild blueberries do not grow as bushes. They are rather what one would generally call groundcover in Germany. Wild blueberries, in contrast to their cultivated relatives, can not simply be planted anywhere. They grow where it's best for them and you can not really explain why this happens at a certain point - and not three meters away. Any attempt to dig out wild blueberries and replant them elsewhere fails.This happens, for example, by undermining the just 20 cm high plants after the end of the harvest season in early September. Next spring, roots in the soil will drive more shoots, making the blueberry field naturally denser. The plants then grow for two years, until they are harvested and dug in the year after next year. This can take 10 to 15 years, until a field is so far that it is evenly guarded closely and can be harvested rewarding. You need to eat meat until the field works properly. Incidentally, in the winter, the blueberry farmers are very happy about snow - because it lays like an insulating layer over the growing blueberries, which would otherwise freeze and die. However, there is no shortage of snow in Canada - last winter in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada up to six meters. People had to dig tunnels out of their houses.

At some point we decide on our blueberry field in the vans that the rain will not stop and we make our way back. And then it comes, as it is so often: the rain stops nevertheless. Just like that, and the sun peeps down to us. Short telephone conversation of our driver with the other van - and we turn off the highway again. Now we can still stand with both feet in the middle of a blueberry field. And pick and try.

Wild blueberries are surprisingly diverse - in contrast to their cultured relatives with dark blue color and usually enormous size. On a field, different sizes and colors grow harmoniously next to each other. You will find small, large, light blue misty, bright blue or almost black berries.

Originally, the wild blueberries were harvested by hand with small rakes in a laboriously stooped posture. In very hilly areas or in heavily sloping fields this is still the case today. On flat fields additionally small automatic picking machines on wheels are used, which are pushed by the harvest helper with neat Muckis. There's a single guy standing in a field somewhere in nowhere and reaping.

"Some call it the middle of nowhere. Some call it home. "

Larger machines or tractors are still rare to see. The use would not be worthwhile for the many small regional producers with only one blueberry field on their bottom.The blueberries are brought by people on their inevitable pickups, unloaded in the colorful boxes, weighed and stored. Then, shortly afterwards, they are loaded onto pallets and sorted together. 95% of the wild blueberries then go as frozen food in the world. 5% of the harvest is eaten by around 35 million Canadians themselves. Or they bake pies - as we will see later on. Or sweet snails. Or muffins. Or they serve it as a sauce to salmon. Or on salad. Or wrap it in rice paper with a bit of just caught lobster. Hach! Blue Mania!

Then it's time for the field. We meet students from the Dalhousie Agricultural Campus of the University of Truro who are doing a research project on the cultivation improvement of blueberries. The three sort the blueberries by hand and document the condition and quality. The goal of the project is to optimize the yield of the field by natural means and to learn more about the wild blueberries. Since the field is amazingly flat, you can also pick the blueberries here for a change with a tractor. The students are obviously very happy about our visit and our interest, we chat a bit and make each other (!) Quite a lot of photos. And, of course, eat a fair amount of blueberries.

It's totally fun to pick the little blue things from hand to mouth, each with a slightly different taste - sweet or tart, fresh or fully ripe Every field tastes a little bit different, which you can see by the way, if you try unrestrained through the boxes of the various blueberry farmers.I am really curious about what awaits us in the next few days, what we will eat, experience and whom we will get to know. I do not suspect at the time that I'll meet a kilt cook, an ancient Morse specialist, and quite a few lobsters and break my toe. But it should be told another time.