Roadside vendor Arthur Choquette has a favourable forecast for local blueberries in Greater Sudbury, predicting a bountiful harvest this season.
“We had a lot of snow and a lot more rain than anticipated, so if we can get over the next three weeks without any frost when they’re in bloom, then we should have a fairly good season,” he said.
Sudbury.com, a sister site of SooToday, caught up with Choquette at Tom Davies Square on Monday afternoon, shortly after the city’s planning committee of city council granted his enterprise a three-year extension.
His and another vendor’s blueberry stands are located on South Lane Road, south of Highway 69, across from the Cecil Facer Youth Centre.
The land is zoned rural, which does not permit outdoor retail sales, necessitating Monday’s planning committee meeting appearance to extend the land’s temporary permitted retail use. Similar allowances were granted in 2014, 2017 and 2020, with three years the legislated limit.
After making the bureaucratic hurdle for a fourth time on Monday, with the committee waiving a $1,360 administrative fee, Choquette said he’s hopeful this will be a good blueberry season.
This year’s blueberry crop expectations follow last year’s dud, which Choquette attributed to the oft-repeated idea that blackflies pollinate blueberry plants. Although blackflies have been found not to pollinate blueberry plants, they are theorized to deplete pollen from other plants during years in which the insects are in great abundance, pushing true pollinators toward more flowers.
Choquette has been into blueberries since their Greater Sudbury-area heyday in the 1970s, when he said he would routinely pick berries the size of a quarter.
Since blueberries thrive in acidic environments, he said the superstack “decimated our blueberry crop,” which the city’s regreening efforts also played a role in hampering.
There were at one time 26 people along Highway 69 selling blueberries, but now he said there are only the two stands, which the city’s planning committee granted a three-year extension for on Monday.
“There aren’t as many blueberries as there were, and a lot of the people selling blueberries were elderly and they had health issues and are now gone, and are operating a blueberry highway in the sky somewhere,” the self-proclaimed “farmers’ agent” said.
Blueberries typically hit their seasonal peak around July 15, though Choquette said that climate change has been sporadically punting that day earlier, with the season starting on June 21 a couple years ago.
“We’ve only had two bumper crops, one in 2011 one in 2019, everything in between has been a hit and a miss,” he said.
When blueberries begin coming in, Choquette said his stand should begin opening from 6:30 a.m. to approximately 3 p.m.
Choquette has been selling blueberries at his current location on South Lane Road since 2004, and hit a snag when someone filed a formal complaint about the stand in 2013. This prompted him to visit the city’s elected officials every three years for temporary zoning use extensions.
Although the planning committee’s Monday decision still needs to be ratified by city council as a whole at a future meeting, the five-member committee’s unanimous decision points to the likelihood a three-year extension will be granted.