Once a year, each year, Nicholas Lindholm waits for the perfect spring day.

There's hardly any wind, usually the sun is out, it's kind of warm, it's not very humid.

When the weather's just right, he gathers a small group of friends and family in a blueberry patch.

I typically have a handful of people who have done it before and they like it so much that I do that come and do it,

but then I also have usually have one or two people who have never done it.

They all don't leather boots and cotton clothing, no sandals or synthetic materials.

Lindholm himself wears a full firefighter's costume.

The followers all wear spray packs filled with water, but Lindholm's spray pack holds something else.

I have a 50-50 mix of diesel and kerosene in about a gallon-sized drip torch.

After a group meeting, the crew gathers behind Lindholm and sets every inch of the field on fire.

This is the step in the cycle where death turns to life.

I'm Dylan Therese and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible and wondrous places.

Today, we're on a farm in Penobscot, Maine, visiting one of the last wild blueberry growers who burns this field by hand every single year.

That's after this.

Nicholas Lindholm never set out to be a blueberry grower.

He moved to Maine to study anthropology and religion at Bates College and only got involved in food production after working on a couple of organic farms in the region.

After a little five or six years on three or four different farms, I knew that this is what I wanted to do.

The blueberry piece was completely coincidental.

He and his wife were looking for land to farm and they bought a plot that just happened to have a patch of wild blueberries growing on it.

As an anthropologist, you know, the world shapes you as much as you try and shape the world around you.

So here we are 25 to 30 years later and actually I am a wild blueberry farmer.

He and his wife now run Blue Hill Berry Company, which sells wild main blueberries at farmer's markets and CSAs throughout the region.

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