While you won’t usually find wild bilberries at your local nursery, you’ll find plenty of highbush blueberries ready for the picking! There are so many fantastic varieties to choose from, each with its own unique harvest window and fruit size. Let’s dive into which ones might be the best fit for your backyard.
Highbush Blueberries for Your Garden
Wild blueberries are a bit finicky and don’t always love garden life, which is exactly why cultivated highbush varieties were developed. These garden favorites produce much larger, juicier berries than their wild cousins. Plus, they have clear flesh rather than blue, so you won’t have to worry about staining your teeth or fingers! Today, there are over 100 varieties out there, with about 30 of them becoming staples for home gardeners.
Choosing the Right Variety for Your Space
The cool thing about blueberries is that they can thrive in either a garden bed or a container. Depending on how much room you have, you might want to look at compact or full-sized shrubs. If you’re a patio gardener, dwarf varieties like “Sylvana” or “Northsky” are perfect for pots.
If you’ve got plenty of space in your garden beds, you can go for the larger, shrub-like varieties. These bigger bushes naturally mean a bigger harvest! Here are a few of my top picks for the garden:
- Bluecrop (one of the most popular all-arounders),
- Blautropf (another fan favorite),
- Duke,
- Patriot, or
- Pilot.
Pro Tip: Stagger Your Harvest Times
If you want to keep the blueberry party going all summer long, I highly recommend planting a mix of early, mid, and late-season varieties. The season usually kicks off in late June or early July with varieties like “Earlyblue.” On the flip side, late bloomers like “Jersey” can keep producing until early October. If you plant only one variety, you might end up with a “blueberry explosion” where everything ripens at once!
But hey, even if you do end up with a massive haul, it’s not the end of the world. While fresh blueberries don’t stay firm forever in the fridge, they freeze beautifully and are perfect for canning. You can turn your extra harvest into all sorts of treats, like:
- Jams and jellies,
- Fruit compotes and parfaits,
- Homemade ice cream,
- Or, of course, classic blueberry pies and muffins.
