For the latest installment of the Press Herald Maine at Work series, reporter Ray Routhier learns how to rake wild blueberries at Hart’s Clary Hill Farm near Union.
Powers runs a blueberry farm that his wife’s family started in the 1930s. The land had originally been a sheep farm, but is now turning out one of Maine’s most iconic crops — wild blueberries.
The challenges to growing blueberries begin with the fact that they are wild, Powers tells me. You don’t plant them, you can’t decide where they’ll grow. This makes weeding or treating them with herbicides tricky. And it makes picking them — on rocky hillsides for instance — tricky as well.