DEBLOIS, Maine — Hopping out of her pickup truck, Brogan Tooley squinted into the August sun as she surveilled the acres of wild blueberries that stretched for miles in every direction. Then, without hesitation, she walked straight into the middle of an unpicked patch, crunching fresh berries beneath her boots with every step.
“Don’t worry about it — it’s a hardy crop,” said Tooley, an agro-ecologist for blueberry grower Wyman’s, gesturing to the wild berries that popped underfoot. “And it’s probably good to return some of those nutrients from the berries back to the soil anyway.”
The bountiful harvest — a boon for Wyman’s and the other 484 wild blueberry growers in the region — was a month early this summer.
