07/23/2025
Getting to know Linbo Blueberries: Hardyblue
"Exceptionally sweet with some of the firmest berries… the ideal blueberry for baking"
-The Royal Horticultural Society
Hardyblue’s superb flavor, sweetness, and firmness lends itself to a multitude of uses like eating fresh, baking, preserving, and freezing. The bushes grow tall and upright making it unsuitable for machine harvesting. Hardyblue won’t be found in grocery stores, and we are happy to have the variety thriving in our field.
Deeper dive into the history of Hardyblue:
Hardyblue is a popular Pacific Northwest cultivar originally bred on the east coast in the 1920s. In the 1900s, Elizabeth Coleman White (originally a New Jersey cranberry farmer) partnered with Frederick Vernon Coville (a chief botanist of the US Department of Agriculture) to cultivate wild northern highbush blueberries. White hired local “Pineys” (backwoods folk that lived off the Pine Barrens and worked odd jobs, such as crop harvesting) to search the woods and collect cuttings of wild blueberries. The Pineys early notable discoveries were found by Ezekiel Sooy and Leek Rube.
The Sooy cultivar produced impressively large berries and was crossed with another cultivar called Brooks, which was named after the landowner of where the plant was found. In 1912, 3000 offspring were produced from the Sooy x Brooks cross. From that cross, two notable varieties were produced: Katharine and Pioneer. Pioneer produced a large delectable berry.
The Rubel cultivar (found by and named after Leek Rube; the cultivar name was changed to Rubel to seem less derogatory) produced outstanding tasty yet small berries. When Rubel was crossed with Pioneer, the 1638th offspring was an absolute winner amongst the 3000 siblings. “1638-A” had sweet, flavorful, and large berries. When Pacific Northwest growers noted how well the bushes thrived in even the toughest of conditions, they started calling it “Hardyblue” and that name stuck.
