Caneberry and strawberry plant sale numbers are out! I’ve recently been asked by a new industry member why there are no blueberry plant sale numbers. The standard answer is “because that’s how it’s always been” but, as always, fresh eyes coming into the industry stopped me in my tracks. It’s a good question that we’re now pondering.
At present, the Northwest Berry Foundation uses our blueberry funded resources to have crop development photos posted each season and caneberry and strawberry funded resources to create the plant sale numbers. In an ideal world, we’d love to have all berries receive both crop development photos and plant sale numbers but blueberry numbers have never been tabulated collectively. We’d need to dig a bit deeper to set an accurate estimate up.
However, there are several blueberry specific questions that come up when thinking about plant sale numbers. When there are proprietary varieties, it makes it difficult to have anonymous numbers delivered. How do we avoid issues like infringement and nursery licensing?
Even with anonymous nursery contributions to the cumulative numbers, would it expose the scale of nurseries to other competing nurseries?
Would this even be helpful information to have circulating in the Pacific Northwest or would it be better to have the whole United States plant sale numbers?
