Blueberry Goodness @ Making Brooklyn Bloom

Participants showing off their jars of Blueberry sugar.

This year’s theme at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Making Brooklyn Bloom conference was “What’s the Buzz? Plants, Pollinators, and People” and for our morning & afternoon workshops we offered a session called The Blues of the Bees: Celebrating the Gift of Blueberries.

This session was all about exploring the botanical and cultural backgrounds of low-bush blueberries which are native to the northeast and have been stewarded by several groups of Indigenous people (e.g. Indigenous people who speak Iroquois, Western Abenaki, and Passamoquoddy) for centuries. Additionally we got into the bees that pollinate these wild and delicious fruits across the region.

After some discussion we got into making blueberry sugar: A simple recipe of combining ground up, freeze-dried blueberries with granulated sugar (which of course you can substitute with any granular sweetener to suit your dietary needs).

Participants were given jars to store their shares of blueberry sugar in and encouraged to try it in their tea, oats, simple syrup for drinks, or other applications that could use a punchy and sweet boost. It’s worth noting that because freeze dried blueberries are preserved at their peak and not cooked, they retain a lot of their nutritional benefits.

Much appreciation to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for having us back this year!