A gift shopping trip for a Michigan woman turned into a calling, when she became a champion for blueberries.
Michigan is the top-producing state in the U.S. for cultivated blueberries.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.
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 , 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.
, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with Washington, Oregon and Georgia trailing behind.Balk, 56, is now part of the blueberry industrial complex. Her store, Blueberry Haven created a nucleus for an industry that didn’t realize it needed one. From downtown Grand Haven, she stocks and sells blueberry baking mixes, salsa, honey, all manner of jams and pie fixings, and, of course, a variety of chocolate-covered dried blueberries.
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