This started out as a story about the incredible blueberry harvest in the midst of this year’s drought. 

One of the seniors picking at Sunnybrae Farm gave Cortes Currents the tip, which Mike Manson subsequently confirmed.

“We are seeing what we think might be the biggest crop ever. In terms of pounds per bush, and the fruit is ripening differently. It’s ripening in a more condensed manner, which is good for picking. The big crop is probably due to favourable conditions for pollination in the spring. Whether or not that had anything to do with dry weather, I’m not sure. Maybe the bees were glad it wasn’t raining and cold and wet, but certainly pollination was key, without that you don’t get a crop. For whatever reason, conditions were favourable for bees to be flying and doing their job,” he said.

“We’ve never seen a dry year start so early.  This year, the dryness started mid May. I remember May 13th was 30 degrees Celsius.  I think  the early heat this year has affected  the way the fruit has ripened. I haven’t seen it ripen in this fashion before.” 

However, there are three blueberry farms on Cortes island and, as I was soon to learn, they are in different micro-climates. 

Linnaea Farm was also having a good year but, according to Tamarra McPhail, conditions there are not the same as in Mansons Landing. 

They were even more different a mere 10 kilometres to the west at ‘Nanagumps Berry Farm and Guest House’ in Whaletown, where the crop wasn’t especially good this year.  

Everyone agreed that there wasn’t much money to be made growing berries.  Their motivation was passion. 

Donna Behn said, “This is what gives us a reason to get up in the morning.”

She and her husband Tom are supposedly ‘retired,’ and have been running the farm and a guesthouse for 13 years. 

The name Nanagumps is a combination of what their grandchildren called them, ‘Nana’ and ‘Gumps.’

As we started our tour, Tom explained, “All of our stuff on the garden side of the gate is run by solar and wind power. All the pumps we use, the fans for the greenhouse, the irrigation system – all run by solar.”

They haven’t devoted as much time to the acre and a half where they grow raspberries and blueberries this year.

“We’ve poured all of our efforts into other areas. We’ve rebuilt our irrigation lagoon, some of the underground irrigation piping. We’re automating our greenhouse, putting in automated misting, some automated vents, temperature control, humidity control. Irrigation throughout is all automatic in our greenhouse, so we can  take the guesswork out of growing,” Tom explained.

“It’s another experiment,” added Donna. (Laughs)

“To get it so it works 24/7, all year round,” said Tom.

Donna explained, “It’s just basically for ourselves this year, because we’re still experimenting with automation. In the past, we’ve had the four varieties of peppers, yellow, orange, green, and the red. We’ve had the jalapeños, habanero peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants.”

CC: Do you also sell these to the U-pick market?

“No, just the berries are U-pick,” she said.

They are not hiring pickers this year, but people pay $4 a pound to U-pick their berries. Donna believes she has hundreds of customers. 

Nanagumps recently posted a notice in the Tideline, “Nanagumps will be closed for berry picking on Wednesday June 28. Berries need to regenerate. They got picked over really good on Tuesday, so give them a day to rejuvenate. Sorry for the inconvenience. See you all on Thursday.” 

The Behns did not spread the netting that protects the plants from birds this year.

“We thought we’d just let things like the netting go a bit and focus on other areas, because the birds need to eat too. We’re surprised there’s really not that many of them,” said Tom.

“We figured we’d be wiped out completely with the birds, but  we’re not. There’s still berries there,” added Donna. 

CC: What kinds of birds come for the berries? 

“Robins, Starlings – that’s about it,” she said.  

“Then the Red Shinned Hawk,” he responded. “When we get a whole bunch of birds, pretty soon we’ve got little hawks about.” 

CC: Do you find that some of the people staying at your guesthouse come because of the farm?  

Donna mused, “It’s constantly busy. I don’t think it’s so much the farm, but a lot of people that do come enjoy the farm. They like to get out and do the picking themselves and whatnot. People come because they have family here or there’s an event that they want to participate in.” 

Tom joked about retiring from retiring, “We used to make jams here and everything else. We’ve decided to slow it down a bit, so we can do more fishing now.” (Laughter)

Cortes Currents asked Donna, “Do you go fishing too?” 

“Oh, absolutely, the boat doesn’t leave the dock without me.”  

No one was available for an interview at Linnaea Farm, but Tamarra did say berries are only a small part of their operation. They are grown on about half an acre of land and destined for members of the Linnaea Food Security Guild.

Bill Weaver had been picking blueberries just before we met at the Squirrel Cove General Store.

“It’s nice to go down to Sunnybrae. The Mansons themselves are such a tradition on Cortes Island. Going down there and picking up five pounds of blueberries, walking out the gate and then realizing I should have gotten ten.”

Mike Manson explained, “My father (Nicol Manson) and I planted the bushes in 1984 and we’ve had a commercial crop to harvest since about 1996. Which I think puts us close to our 28th season growing commercially”. 

“When I say commercially, it’s more about the volume. The benchmark for us is 4,000 pounds. If you were growing for yourself, with 4,000 pounds you’d be swimming in blueberries. You have to sell it, that is my definition of commercial opposed to home use.”

“One year we dipped to 1,000 pounds, but we’ve also had years where we’ve had over 6,000 pounds. Which is interesting because we’ve learned that the community will buy 5,000, maybe 5,500 pounds. After that,  you have to phone people back and see if you can encourage them to buy more.”

An acre overlooking the Salish Sea is devoted to blueberries.

CC: Tell me something about how you came to plant your blueberry bushes in a swamp, and what difference that makes. 

Mike Manson: “We had a big bulrush swamp on the property, much like the one by the motel where you go around the S turns. A true swamp, you couldn’t walk through it.”

“We wanted to make use of that land, so we asked the Ministry of Agriculture what would grow in a swamp if we could recover it. It was probably about 1983. The guy said, blueberries or grapes.  At the time, grapes certainly weren’t in vogue  for wine.  It was probably about 1983. So we decided to go with blueberries.”

“We had to blast a ditch to drain that swamp and eventually, Ken Hanson rototilled it.  It was pure peat, which is what blueberries love.  We tried growing blueberries in some other soils, which were sandy, and they died.  We could not keep enough water on them.  They died right before our eyes. It was too dry, but the ones in the peat thrived. They absolutely thrive. There’s no question that that’s the perfect spot for blueberry crops.” 

“That’s what I tell people who say, ‘what can I do with my blueberries?’  I say,  ‘Go look for a swamp somewhere and take a bucket of that black muck out and put it around your plant and that should make the difference.’ Not peat moss that you buy at the nursery, dried out stuff that’s been sterilized or whatever, but the black peat with its bacteria and fungi and stuff I don’t even know about. That’s the magic.” 

CC: Describe your season, right from the beginning

Mike Manson: “Blueberries are a lot of work. People come down now and they say, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ The grass is cut, the nets are up, the berries are there and they pick them and they come up the hill and pay for them and off they go.”

“For me, it starts back in January. I’ve got about a month worth of pruning to get through all those bushes and then you  remove all the prunings.  Sometime in late February, early March, we have to spray for Mummy Berry, which is a fungal infection of blueberries and we spray a biofungicide called Serenade. It’s an organic solution. It allows us to manage the mummy berry, but we can’t eradicate it. So I’ve got six, seven weeks of spraying. I spray once a week, weather permitting, and around. March, April, the grass is starting to grow tall, we now get grass 18 inches, 2 feet tall, and so you’re starting to cut with the tractor, you’ve got to weed eat around the bushes and that’s ongoing into May, June, and then sometime in June you realize that you’ve got to start netting the fruit, because  you can see the blue and the birds are coming.”

“So we net, and then we start putting the word out about orders,  collecting boxes from the local stores, because you have to put this fruit in something, and the phones start ringing. We start taking orders, and meanwhile the grass and maintenance in the blueberry patch has to be kept up.”

“For me, most of the work is from January to June. Donna has got a very difficult job now, in the sense that it’s four or five hours every day. Sometimes she gets one day off in six weeks. On her feet, many phone calls, getting people to pick up their order. Some people want two pound, other want 60 pounds. Some say, ‘What did we get last year?’ And we’re thinking, ‘We don’t know what you’ve got last year, we’ve got 250 customers or something.’” 

“So it goes, on and on. Phones ring late at night, early in the morning. We get texts, we get emails,  And they’re all our lifeline. Without that, you don’t have your sales.  You need it, but it takes energy. It’s a lot of communication and at times, communication wears you out. It’s trying to remember a lot and trying to be friendly. Sometimes you’re tired and it’s not as easy to be as friendly as you might be first thing in the morning.”

“Then we have orders for the stores too.” 

“For Donna, this is her time. She’s the boss right now. No question. And maybe she’s the boss all the time. I don’t know, but she’s definitely the boss right now.”

CC: Is there a lot of money in blueberries? 

MM: “At face value for people doing their basic arithmetic, if they know we’ve got 4,000 pounds of berries and we sell them for $6.50 a pound, that should be about $27,000, which is not bad.”

“That’s pretty good money, I would say. But when you consider that the picker gets $3 a pound, that leaves $3.50 a pound for us. So for $3.50 a pound, the money is not quite the same. It probably works out to be about $14,000 or something. You pay your property taxes, you fence, you net, you spray, you cut. You take all the phone calls. Donna works for 40 days straight in the shed. So you start figuring that out on an hourly rate and a lot of people wouldn’t do that.” 

“So money is one test for sure, but the other test is intangibles like  the people coming up the hill with their bright big plump blueberries.  They’re so happy and they’re gobbling them up. They pay for them and they’re gobbling as they walk down the driveway. It warms your heart to see people really thrilled by what we’re doing. That’s a dividend. That’s a payday. That’s undeniable.  We’ve been doing this for so long we’re well known and after a while you can’t help but just feel proud of what happens. You don’t start out that way, but people keep on coming. We make money in different ways, if you will. There’s a financial component and then there’s  from the heart. We do well.” 

C: What does the blueberry sector represent to Cortes Island as a business sector? There’s at least three of you doing it. 

Mike Manson: “From a business perspective, to get our crop of 4,000 berries,  it takes about 700 man hours of picking. A person can pick roughly six pounds per hour. Some people can pick eight, but if you use six pounds, it takes 700 hours to get the crop in .  If one person was to do all the picking  and you work that into 40 hour work weeks, it turns out it’s only 18 weeks of work. So in terms of the impact on the economy, it would employ one person for 18 weeks if they worked 40 hours a week. That’s hardly a full-time job. There’s 20,00 working hours in a year if you work full time.”

CC: So in terms of worker hours, Cortes Island’s three blueberry farms probably do not provide enough work to employ one full time picker. 

 Mike Manson: “That’s correct, at the end of the day any impact on the economy financially is arguably not that much.” 

“Although it’s very busy down there now, we sometimes have 20 people or more coming per day, they’re only down there for a couple hours. You can’t be down there long in the patch, it gets so hot and humid. The smart pickers show up at seven,  they can beat the hot temperatures, but by 11 o’clock, most are sweltering and very few make it to noon.”  

“Certainly from a food perspective,  a lot of families on Cortes have blueberries in their freezer, but we’re not a big employer by any means.” 

CC: Do you have anything else you’d like to mention?

Mike Manson: “If you can’t get the crop in, you don’t have anything. You can do all the work, and it survives the weather and the drought and everything else, but you have to get it in. It’s labour intensive. It’s not hard labour, but it requires many fingers, and you’ve got the short part of the day each and every day because of the temperature. So we need a lot of pickers.” 

“Historically we always had kids. Kids would phone us up in April. ‘Can I get a job picking?’ They were so excited. They’d phone in May and phone in June, ‘When do we start?’ Sometimes we’d have 15 kids that would want to pick, and we had family that would help too, but the kids did well. They’d pick really well, they’d save up money for skateboards and  whatever they wanted. They had fun. It was their first ‘real’ job, not working for grandma or washing somebody’s car or floor. It was working for a so called stranger and earning their first money.” 

“Now, I don’t know what’s up with the kids. We don’t get those calls anymore. My suspicion is that money doesn’t have quite the same value, or it’s more readily available to the kids than it was when we were kids. We would do anything to get a quarter. Now I think grandmothers or aunties give a kid a hundred bucks for their birthday and the kids aren’t wanting.”

“I can pick eight pounds an hour. So at our picking rate , I can make 24 bucks an hour. A kid who focuses, I’m talking about an 11 or12 year old who focuses, will pick six, seven pounds per hour. So he’s making upwards of $21 an hour to listen to his or her music and be in their shorts with no parents over their shoulder. It’s an easy job. There’s no brambles.  The grass is cut. It doesn’t get any better and yet they’re not coming.” 

“There is a story there. We all need people. Just look at Bertha’s store. I mean, gosh, we can’t lose Bertha’s store (the Cortes Market) or Curt (the Squirrel Cove Store) and the Gorge store. All of us, we all need people. We really do.  I don’t know what it’s going to take to get us to get out there and help everybody.”

CC: When did you start noticing a shortfall in workers here? 

Mike Manson: “About three years ago, it started suddenly. It surprised us, it was just boom just before COVID and certainly at COVID, then it changed for sure. They didn’t come back.  It’s disappointing.  We need them. It’s not child labor. You make a good wage. There’s no mistake about it. It’s a good entry level job. It’s a job where parents know their kids are safe and they can learn to go out and start making their way in the world.”

“There’s many reasons why you should come and pick for us or any other blueberry grower and work at the stores. You have to start somewhere and it’s important. There’s a beginning.” 

The half dozen pickers at work when Cortes Currents arrived, at 9 AM, were mostly seniors. 

CC: What’s the median age of your pickers? 

Mike Manson: “I’m going to have to say just shy of 40 because we now hire seniors.”

“Seniors love it. They get it. They hear the birds. They get some extra money. They love the quiet, the solitude. It’s like meditation. And then we’ve got our young ones. So when you take our seniors against the young age of 12, I think our oldest picker might be 76 and the oldest ones  might miss literally 3 or 4 days out of 40. They’re the first to get here.” 

“So they’re great, but as a grower I can’t just look at seniors. We have a range of demographics for pickers. Whatever it takes. You’ve got to get that crop off. It won’t wait. 

CC: I’ve got one more question, you don’t just grow blueberries. How important are blueberries in terms of your total farm? 

Mike Manson: The blueberries are key for sure. They generate the cash and  we don’t separate each sector of our farming activity  to assess whether or not it’s stand alone viable, like whether the sheep or lambs, meat lambs make money for us, or the chickens, but when we throw it all together in the pot with the blueberries, and you know, you get apples and pears we sell, but when you throw it all in the pot, at the end of the day all the bills are paid for and we’re happy.”

“It’s a lifestyle. We eat well. We have everything we need. We’re at the age where our vehicles are paid for, obviously the farm is paid for, and we don’t need a huge amount of income, but you can’t be hemorrhaging money.  The blueberries make sure everything’s paid for and looked after.”

Top image credit: Reaching for one of Sunnybrae Farm’s blueberries – Roy L Hales photo

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