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Cultivated Blue -berries:
Mechanized shaking devices were already in use for harvesting sour cherries, cultivated blue -berries blue-berries, olives, prunes, and some peaches and apples. The devices were undergoing changes to make them adaptable to the picking of other crops. Some varieties of lettuce, asparagus, strawberries, oranges, and other produce were, as yet, too delicate for machine handling.The huckleberries (Gaylussacia) have most of the flavors that blueberries have. They are often sold locally in the markets, but because of their large bony seeds are likely to become less and less important as the acreage of cultivated blue -berries blueberries increases. The so-called whortleberries (of which name "huckleberry" seems to be a corruption) of Europe include V. myrtillus and V. uliginosum. The former is the bilberry (in Scotland the blue-berry) ; of varying height, but rarely over two feet, with deciduous ovate leaves. The berries, dark purple with a mealy bloom, grow to the size of a black currant and are sweet flavored.
The only members of the Vacciniaceae extensively cultivated blue -berries in North America are the cranberries (Oxycoccus), which are evergreen, woody, vine-like shrubs growing in sphagnum bogs; and the blueberries (Vaccinium), which grow in acid soils not quite so low as those in which cranberries grow. The cranberry plants are small and slender and somewhat trailing in habit, but have ascending or erect branches bearing oblong leaves, and pink, star-shaped flowers in clusters. The berries are oval and pendulous on filiform stalks, and have a shining red skin and firm, white flesh of a very acid taste.
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