Michigan’s blueberry coast is ripe for the picking

Blueberries needed a champion, and Tiffany Balk was more than up to the task.

Fifteen years ago, Balk went to send a gift to a friend in Chicago from her home in Grand Haven, Michigan.

Her husband suggested a box of dried cherries, the signature crop of the Traverse City area.

But Grand Haven is some 150 miles south of Traverse City, west of Grand Rapids, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Totally different area, totally different vibe, Balk told her husband.

“Blueberries are to southwest Michigan like cherries are to northern Michigan,” she said. As soon as she heard herself, Balk realized she’d hit on a niche business.

Blueberries are indeed the little, round, cute, colorful crop that defines midsummer along the gentle dunes and broad beaches of the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. Like dried cherries, cranberries and raisins, dried blueberries add a jolt of flavor in cookies, cakes and salads. Blueberries freeze beautifully, meaning the crop can yield mix-ins for breads and muffins year-round.

So Balk got to it. It was a specialty business just waiting to be created.

Blueberry season typically blooms around July 4 and continues through the end of August, with different varieties rolling into Michigan farm stands along Interstate Highway 196, which hugs the lake from Indiana to Grand Haven.

You-pick farms offer a taste of the backbreaking work of hand-raking blueberries. Every Michigan farmer’s market spills with baskets, buckets and boxes of blueberries. Along with July marking National Blueberry Month, South Haven’s National Blueberry Festival (blueberryfestival.com), set this year for Aug. 11-14, is another great excuse to indulge with children’s pie-eating contests, a parade and a pie social.

Blueberries love light, sandy soil, which makes the beaches and bluffs of southwestern Michigan the perfect setting for growing the 110 million pounds of berries the state produced in 2020. That makes Michigan the leading national producer of cultivated blueberries, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with Washington, Oregon and Georgia trailing behind.

Maine leads in wild, or lowbush, berries, producing 102 million pounds in 2020.

Balk, 56, is now part of the blueberry industrial complex. Her store, Blueberry Haven (213 Washington Ave., Grand Haven; 616-935-7562; blueberry-haven.com) created a nucleus for an industry that didn’t realize it needed one. From downtown Grand Haven, she stocks and sells (on-site and online) blueberry baking mixes, salsa, honey, all manner of jams and pie fixings, and, of course, a variety of chocolate-covered dried blueberries. All of what she offers is made in Michigan, most of it right in or around Grand Haven.

Growing up in northern Maine, her childhood was straight out of the classic children’s book, “Blueberries for Sal,” by Robert McCloskey, in which a preschool blueberry thief and her bear equivalent are “all mixed up on Blueberry Hill” while their respective mothers are gathering berries to store up for winter.

“We used to go over to Machias and rake blueberries at my cousin’s farm,” she says, referring to a coastal town in Maine. “In the summertime, if you were poor, what did you do? You’d go rake blueberries.”

College brought her to central Michigan, where she met and married her husband and started a family. Working for a regional clothing store taught her the retail business.

Looking for a gift that didn’t exist showed her what to sell. “There was no blueberry brand,” Balk said. As soon as her youngest child entered kindergarten, she set up her company and started making and selling blueberry-centric products at the local farmer’s market.

First came a pancake mix. Then came jam, then chocolate-covered blueberries.

When a storefront in downtown Grand Haven became available in 2010, she and her husband went all in and bought it. The store opened in 2011.

It’s hard to avoid blueberries along the western coast of Michigan, but who would want to?

South of Grand Haven, Holland is studded with blueberry options. Among the best: blueberry doughnuts at the two Bowerman Blueberry locations (You-pick and farm market, 15793 James St., Holland; Bowerman’s on 8th Cafe and Bakery, 2 E. 8th St., Holland; 616-738-3099; realblueberries.com), and S. Kamphuis (4140 148th Ave., Holland; 616-399-9545; skamphuisblueberries.com), where you also can buy frozen berries.

At Blueberry Haven, Balk finds no end to blueberry everything, from barbecue sauce to coffee. The bestseller? Chocolate-covered blueberries, but blueberry salsa comes in a close second.

And just to make sure her Illinois customers feel appreciated, especially University of Illinois alumni and fans, Balk added a dash of orange to her brand’s deep-blue labels.

Blueberries were a staple for Indigenous American tribes who originally occupied what’s now known as the Midwest. Found as far south as the Mexican border and as far north as eastern Canada and Alaska, the 35 species of blueberries indigenous to North America were an uncelebrated seasonal staple until a government botanist crafted cultivars that could sustain commercial farming, according to Ryan Pankau, a horticulturist with the University of Illinois Extension in Urbana.

Discovery of their antioxidant properties vaulted blueberries from dessert ingredient to health food staple. It takes only a ½ cup — 30 calories’ worth — of fresh blueberries to deliver 25% of the recommended daily amount of vitamin C and three grams of dietary fiber, according to the Mayo Clinic.

About half of the 690 million pounds of blueberries produced in 2020 were sold fresh, and the rest were processed, according to the USDA.

Find blueberry updates and events through the Grand Haven Convention and Visitors’ Bureau (visitgrandhaven.com).

Grab a rake and comb through the branches for berries at you-pick farm; such farms for blueberries and all kinds of produce can be scoutedat pickyourown.org.

Or pick up your berries at a Michigan farmers market (michigan.org/farmers-markets), locating one convenient for your travels.

Joanne Cleaver is a freelance writer.