The Harvest Continues

There are two different kinds of chokecherry trees.  One kind has green leaves.  The other kind has red leaves.  Every tree in our yard has green leaves.  Most of the ornamental trees around town in the parks and at businesses are the red-leafed variety.  We picked some red-leafed chokecherries when we discovered them, after I had harvested all of our cherries.  They were not as puckering and seemed to be a lot bigger than what I'd harvested.  A side-by-side comparison shows a really dramatic difference between the two.

We knew they were bigger, but I didn't think they were that much bigger!  After asking the parks department if I could pick them and getting a resounding yes, I got to work.

The bounty of a red-leafed chokecherry.

Not only were they seemingly more bountiful, but it took fewer chokecherries to fill my buckets.  I quickly gathered about 2 gallons.

The problem with things this easy to find and this bountiful is that it becomes addictive to harvest them.  It doesn't matter what fruit it is.  In fact, I harvested more chokecherries yesterday afternoon.

Last night we finally had a hard frost.  That means we're headed out to harvest low-bush cranberries/lingonberries this morning.  I suspect, since our picking location is so plentiful, that we aren't going to stop until we've filled every container we take out there.

Bunchberries: Useful or Useless?

The research we had done on bunchberries showed only that they have a very high amount of natural pectin and very little water and taste of their own.  We found a small handful of recipes, mostly for raspberry bunchberry syrup and not much else.

However, we didn't want to just take everyone else's word for it, so we took a small amount of berries and cooked them down.

For something so bright red and sometimes almost orange, this was not quite the color we were expecting.  Also, they really do have very little flavor of their own.  My husband added some honey to it, but all that really did was make it taste like honey.

After this confirmation, we have been trying to decide what to do with the gallons of bunchberries we still have sitting in our garage.  We know they're good to use as natural pectin in jams and jellies as they carry the flavors of other fruits well--because they don't have their own flavor to speak of.

To try to find more about using them as pectin, I found this blog, Bunchberry Farm.  Jasmine has helped give me a little guidance as to how to use them as pectin, but mostly we'll be guessing and checking.  Our biggest problem right now is the lack of all our handy dandy kitchen gadgets to assist with extracting seeds and crushing them up.  As you can see in the picture, they actually hold their form fairly well.

We're still trying to decided, since we are very short on freezer storage space, whether to keep what we harvested or not.  I really hate to throw away something that is not totally useless and that we spent 45 minutes out in the cold rain gathering, but we might since they aren't exceptionally useful and we are so low on space right now.

The most useful thing that came out of harvesting all these bunchberries?  When we first found them last weekend, we were on a hunt for crowberries to harvest.  What we realized very quickly as we started raking in the bunchberries this Saturday was that they were entirely surrounded by blueberries--lots and lots of blueberries!  Now, right now is not a good time for blueberries, so the plants were not very fruitful.  However, there were many plants that both of us saw that still had quite a few blueberries still hanging on, meaning they had not been picked clean by someone.

In short, thanks to going back for the bunchberries caused us to realize that we had found our blueberry patch for next year.  That made it all worth it.  And it is most definitely staying an undisclosed location!

Bunches and Bunches of Berries

Last weekend when we were out scouting good berry locations in the area, we found these very plentiful berries but we had no idea if they were edible or not.

After asking a few people whether they knew what they were and whether they were edible, I went searching online and quickly found that they are--surprise, surprise--bunchberries!  The plant is commonly known as a dwarf dogwood.  The berries are edible but there is not a lot of information out there about how to use them.

Once we knew this and where to gather gallons of them quickly, we planned to revisit this location and pick a whole bunch.  What better time to go pick them than a cold, rainy day like today?  With two berry rakes and lots of containers, we managed to harvest several gallons in around an hour.

Due to the rain and all the leaves we raked up with them, I decided it would be easier to lay them all out to dry before trying to get the chaff out, which is best done with most berries by rolling them down a dry towel-covered board.

The next question is: what do we do with all these berries now?

While we wait for the berries to dry, enjoy one of our lovely views from today:

Undisclosed berry-picking location

In Search of Wild Blueberries

We've heard that the blueberries up here are extremely plentiful.  We had also heard that the blueberries were behind their normal schedule this year.  As such, we were waiting to go looking for them.  Last Sunday, we were talking with some friends at church about how we were going raspberry picking that afternoon because someone told us that they were on in full force and where to go find some.  One of these friends, who has been here just a year or two longer than we have, mentioned that the blueberries were early this year.  We looked at her funny and said we'd heard the opposite.  Apparently, they had gone out and picked a bunch at the end of July.

With this news, my husband started asking around at work for recommendations on where to go find blueberries.  That is no easy task around here.  I did a little searching online and found this article (published on August 1st!) that made me chuckle because it is 100% true--around here you never tell people where your berry batch is or where you go moose hunting, unless you're telling them the "known" spots.  My husband actually was told a spot where there are tons of blueberries, but it was the first place mentioned in that article: Murphy Dome.

So Friday, we loaded up the family and headed out to try to find this spot on Murphy Dome.  We were told that you could drive right up to it, which was good because we have two very young children and we don't yet have our bear gun up here and bears love berries even more than humans.  Even so, we were armed with a bear bell (to announce your presence so you don't startle a bear), bear spray, and mosquito repellent.

The drive up to the top of the dome was fine, but we had to continue on the north side for a bit and it rained quite a bit in the previous 24 hours.

When we saw this, we decided to stop while we knew we could still turn around and get back.  We weren't entirely sure what blueberry plants looked like, so we wandered off near the truck to see what we could find.  What we found was a lot of blueberry plants...and very few blueberries.  We thought if we wandered farther down the trail, as we were told to do, we'd find a lot more blueberries.  

We found blueberries all right.  However, most of what we found was completely stripped clean blueberry plants.  There were blueberries all over the place, but next to no actual berries anymore.

That's all completely empty blueberries.  

So are those.  We walked all the way out to the rocky outcropping in the distance.  Obviously, we were a few weeks too late.

My husband and our daughter wandered all over out there thinking there HAD to be some out there still.  Yeah, they were wrong.  We saw many lingonberries (also called low-bush cranberries) and other berries that we didn't know whether they were edible or not.  We picked what few blueberries we found as we headed back toward our truck.  As we were on our way back up the trail, we met a family who was out for crowberries and bearberries, two varieties of black berries that we'd seen plenty of but didn't know were edible.  Once we learned that, we tried some and started picking those as well.

Picking blueberries

Picking bearberries

We didn't come home with a huge haul, but, after doing research on crowberries and bearberries, we determined we would go back out and get more crowberries another day.  But that is a story for another day.

Mostly crowberries on the left and blueberries on the right.

Even though that's all we came home with from an afternoon of picking, we had a great time hiking and the scenery was amazing.

Heading back into town