Amidst a speedy summer, we're creeping up on blueberry season, which brings us to another fifth-generation farm producing blueberries, apples, peaches, and … ice cream? To celebrate National Blueberry Month we’re chatting with Buchan’s Blueberry Hill on Old Mission Peninsula. Grab a slice of pie and learn how Ben and Lori Buchan are working to maintain the family’s longtime plot of land while also diversifying for the future. 

Buchan’s has been a fixture at the farmer’s market going back decades, and Lori has seen it change a lot in the 35 years she’s been there – in fact, the entire purpose of the market has essentially changed. “Before, people would go there because they got better deals,” she says. “The whole idea of the farmer's market was for farmers to get rid of any excess fruit that they couldn't get rid of, way back in the day. Now there's farms that only do farmers markets.”

Lori herself started at the market when her in-laws were still running the farm. “[We] started with apples because they always had such a big apple crop, and they never did anything with apples. They had the u-pick and that was it; they had all these extra apples. So I would take them into the farmer market and that was back when there was just one row of vendors on that sidewalk. Just one small little row,” Lori says. 

Their blueberries are the big draw these days, and those ripen up near the end of July, which is when Buchan’s business gets extremely busy. That crop almost wasn’t the case, though. After farming potatoes and cherries (of course) there was another option up for consideration: “Back in the day, [Ben’s family] had this property, and it was kind of swampy, and they were trying to figure out what to do with it to make it pay for itself. And, as far as I know, they were originally going to do cranberries,” Lori says. “I don't know what changed their mind; I don't know if there was another farmer who said, ‘Hey, you should try this,’ but thank God, he did it – he planted blueberries.” 

Even though the state-wide output has dropped over the last few years, Michigan is still one of the leading blueberry producers in the nation. With that being the case, you might wonder why blueberry farms are so rare up north? Climate and soil play a large part, so you can thank the farm’s OMP microclimate for providing what other locations might not offer, Lori explains. “We're kind of in a unique spot. Wild blueberries go rampant up north, but down here, we're kind of in a weird climate. So people are kind of shocked that we have blueberries up here.” 

There’s another surprising ingredient to the blueberries you get at Buchan’s: “They're growing in peat,” Lori says. “So when there is a lot of water and you're walking in the blueberries, if you stop and somebody walks by, you can feel it. Because the peat is floating.”

When those blueberries are ripened up and plucked from their peat raft, they’ll be available at the market, where Lori’s as excited to see you as you are to see them. “I love the farm market. I enjoy the heck out of the farm market,” Lori says. “That's my happy place. That's the highlight of my week is the farm market [because] for the most part, everybody's happy to be there. They're happy to see you there. They've been waiting for you.” They’ll be there through the return to the Mercado in the fall, when they’ll pivot to unpasteurized cider, apples and doughnuts until about Thanksgiving. 

If you can’t make it to the market, there are a few other opportunities to get your mitts on some berries. Their U-pick farm is available for blueberries and apples into fall, but if you don’t want to trek up Old Mission you can stop at Buchan’s West Bay or Scoops 22 for some homemade ice cream with farm-fresh ingredients. Extending into ice cream wasn’t just a new way to use some of their harvest – it was also to protect against a time where they might not have a harvest at all. “What if we have a really bad crop and we can't pay our bills, then what?” Lori asks. “You know, this is all we have. And in 2015 we found out. When we had that storm with those 100-mile-an-hour straight winds – it wiped us out. So had we not had ice cream? I don't know what we would have done. One bug, one tornado, one bad weather situation, can wipe out a farmer.”

So what’s Lori’s favorite way to enjoy a Buchan’s crop? It’s not pie or ice cream. “In the fall [my favorite] is my apple cider. I could drink that by the gallon and it doesn't seem to bother me. And my other favorite is blueberries right off the bush. I hesitate to say that because we get so many people going out there [to u-pick] for two hours and they come back with a pint. I'm like, Dude, I know your stomach is full,” Lori says with a laugh. Don’t challenge her to a blueberry-eating contest, though: “My mother law is always just amazed at the amount of fruit I can put down. I'll sit down to a quart [of berries] and she'll look at me [like], ‘Oh, honey.’ But it's feeding my brain!”