• Overview of Blueberry Producing Areas
• Yarmouth County
• Cumberland County
• Guysborough County
• The Blueberry Season

Overview of Blueberry Producing Areas
The most common species of blueberry harvested in Nova Scotia is the wild lowbush type, known scientifically as Vaccinium angustifolium Ait. The lowbush blueberry plants grow wild all over the province, requiring a high acidic soil. Their most common habitat is high, dry, thin, rocky soils where there is little or no tree growth. Many of the blueberry barrens in Nova Scotia are natural, having developed in areas where little else will grow. Others have grown on lands which have either accidently or purposely been destroyed by fire, or have been cleared and later abandoned. Although these berries grow all over the province, they are most abundant in Yarmouth, Cumberland and Guysborough counties.

Map of Nova Scotia

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Vaccinium corymbosum L., the highbush blueberry, occurs in the southwestern counties from Digby around to Halifax ­ bogs, upland rocky barrens, dry soil and along lake margins. [1] The native population is too limited to be of commercial importance. [2]

Yarmouth County
Yarmouth County occupies the extreme southwestern end of the province. The area is bounded on the south and southwest by the Atlantic Ocean, on the north by Digby County and on the east by Shelburne County. It occupies an area slightly over 895 square miles.

Map of Yarmouth County

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The county population in 1881 was 21,184. The population rose gradually until the Twenties and Thirties when the Depression brought a sharp decline that took it below its 1881 figure. In the mid-Thirties, however, the population rose sharply and continued to rise after the Second World War.

Yarmouth County is well supplied with coastal roads but there is little inland transportation, with the exception of the highways to Kemptville and Quinan, the primary blueberrying regions.

The county is situated on a gently undulating plain rising slowly from sea level to an elevation of nearly 625 feet in the northeast.The average temperature for the summer months is 59ºF with milder temperatures and greater precipitation falling on the coastal areas. Inland soil moisture deficiencies often occur in the late summer.

Large areas in Yarmouth County have been burned over by forest fires ­ many areas having been swept by fire several times. These areas are slow to regenerate forest. Since the climate is conducive to the rapid growth of heath, the burned-over areas generally have a covering of heath, blueberries, lambkill, sweet fern and huckleberry, together with occasional red pine, wire birch and white spruce. Where burned-over areas are covered with bush growth, the dominant species are wire birch, poplar, red maple, willow and alder.

There are only two major geologic divisions represented in the area. The rock formations of the Devonian age are granitic and are exposed in three areas of the county. Approximately two-thirds of the county is underlain by Precambrian quartzite and quartz shist.

Rock Formations in Yarmouth County

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The parent material of granitic origin is very coarse and gritty in texture, and pale brown to light brownish-grey in colour. The soils are often very shallow over bedrock and in some areas are too thin to support forest growth, leaving room for lower bushes such as the blueberry. Due to the thinness of the soil it is not a county well suited to agriculture, a fact substantiated by the lack of inland population.

Cumberland County
Cumberland County is Nova Scotia's westernmost county, occupying the isthmus which joins the province to mainland North America. To the southeast and southwest of the county are Colchester County and the Bay of Fundy respectively. To the west is New Brunswick, and to the north the Northumberland Strait.

Cumberland County may be divided into three physiographic regions which coincide with the underlying bedrock and agricultural land use. These are the Cobequid Mountains, a range of uplands to the south; the Cumberland plain, a broad area of lowlands extending from the Cobequids to Northumberland Strait and Cumberland Basin in the north and west; and the tidal flats along the coast and in the river estuaries around the head of Cumberland Basin.

The Cobequid Mountains rise to elevations from 850 to 1000 feet along a straight east-west line just to the south.of Springhill. The summits of the hills are broad and rounded and have, in many instances, been cleared for agricultural purposes. [3] It is along the ridges of these mountains that most of the Cumberland County blueberries grow. Large amounts of land were cleared by both the French and English settlers, land which proved most difficult to farm due to both its relief and rocky soils. By the late 1800's the acreage of improved agricultural land had reached its greatest extent. By the turn of the century, much of this land had been abandoned and was soon propagated by blueberries and other lowbush plants. Later, burning was used to keep back the forests which threatened to encroach upon this newly found source of wealth.

Cumberland County is both well-populated and well-serviced. It has an abundance of roads which serve the large, dispersed rural population.

Guysborough County
Guysborough County is located on the northeast corner of mainland Nova Scotia, bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, by Halifax County to the southwest, and by Pictou and Antigonish Counties to the west.

Guysborough County, much like Yarmouth, consists largely of rocky, acidic soils, and is covered for the most part by extensive forests. The bedrock formations consist of a granitic Devonian type, and a Mississippian shale. Like Yarmouth, Guysborough has a population which is settled largely in the coastal regions, with few roads servicing the inland areas. It has a very small population (one of the smallest in the province), and its few main centres house most of them.

Blueberries in Guysborough County have developed largely in areas where poor soils and fire have made the land good for little else. It was a latecomer in the berry business, becoming a competitor commercially only during the 1930's.

The Blueberry Season
The blueberry season in Nova Scotia tends to vary from one region to another. One common factor of the provincial season is that it is invariably later than the season in Maine. This was to prove advantageous for both Maine and Nova Scotia as it meant that competition on the Boston market was only tough in the period in midsummer when the two seasons overlapped briefly.

In the southern part of the province the season usually started towards the end of July, although if the weather was warm the season would come earlier. In 1889, the first shipment of the season left Yarmouth on the 12th of July, the earliest recorded to that date. [4a] In the northern part of the province it was usually well into the middle of August before any large amounts of berries could be harvested.

In these regions of the province a good season tends to last four to six weeks. The season is, of course, somewhat reliant upon Nova Scotia's unreliable weather. Too wet, too dry or too cold weather could and has often interfered with the length and success of the season (there is no record of it ever being too hot!).

Several years in the period under study sustained unexpected frosts in late August and early September which proved devastating to the late crop. In 1888 the Yarmouth Telegram reported that the berries in September were completely ruined by an early frost. [4b] In 1934, the season and yield were greatly reduced in Cumberland by the extreme dryness throughout August [5], while in 1936 the season was shortened by a long stretch of cool rainy days. [6]

Despite problems with unpredictable weather and other obstacles, both physical and human, the blueberry industry was and is still an important part of the Nova Scotian economy.