Berry Madness

[rachelmanija]

When my last Native Foods Nursery order arrives and is planted, I will have nine types of berries growing on my land: strawberries, blackberries (wild), raspberries (wild and cultivated), blueberries, golden currants, salmonberries, thimbleberries, salal berries, and honeyberries/haskaps.

I have never tried the latter five - please comment if you have! - and in fact only learned about them on the website. But since I've only ever encountered one berry I really dislike, I have high hopes. Except for the salal berries, which are mostly for the birds.)

Poll #26912

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 105

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I have eaten these berries FRESH (pies, sauce, jam, & dried doesn't count unless stated otherwise. You may mention that in comments though.)

View Answers

Strawberries
105 (100.0%)

Blueberries
103 (98.1%)

Raspberries
103 (98.1%)

Blackberries
101 (96.2%)

Mulberries
51 (48.6%)

Lingonberries
22 (21.0%)

Cranberries
58 (55.2%)

Boysenberries
31 (29.5%)

Cloudberries
16 (15.2%)

Currants (state color in comments)
50 (47.6%)

Serviceberries
12 (11.4%)

Honeyberries/Haskaps
7 (6.7%)

Salal berries
4 (3.8%)

Gooseberries (non-fresh counts)
51 (48.6%)

Elderberries (non-fresh counts)
34 (32.4%)

Huckleberries
25 (23.8%)

Thimbleberries
9 (8.6%)

Salmonberries
17 (16.2%)

Marionberries/ollalieberries/similar crosses
23 (21.9%)

Maypop
0 (0.0%)

Jambutica
2 (1.9%)

Other berry I will mention in comments
12 (11.4%)

Acai (okay I GUESS bowls count)
13 (12.4%)

My favorite berries are...

View Answers

Strawberries
52 (53.6%)

Blueberries
42 (43.3%)

Raspberries
62 (63.9%)

Blackberries
39 (40.2%)

Mulberries
10 (10.3%)

Lingonberries
7 (7.2%)

Cranberries
16 (16.5%)

Boysenberries
4 (4.1%)

Cloudberries
4 (4.1%)

Red currants
16 (16.5%)

White currants
1 (1.0%)

Golden currants
2 (2.1%)

Black currants
16 (16.5%)

Serviceberries
1 (1.0%)

Honeyberries/Haskaps
1 (1.0%)

Salal berries
0 (0.0%)

Gooseberries
9 (9.3%)

Huckleberries
6 (6.2%)

Thimbleberries
1 (1.0%)

Salmonberries
3 (3.1%)

Marionberries
10 (10.3%)

Ollallieberries
1 (1.0%)

Maypop
0 (0.0%)

Jambutica
0 (0.0%)

Other berry I will state in comments
2 (2.1%)

Acai (okay I GUESS bowls count)
0 (0.0%)

I HATE this berry!

View Answers

Strawberries
3 (6.5%)

Blueberries
3 (6.5%)

Raspberries
3 (6.5%)

Blackberries
4 (8.7%)

Mulberries
2 (4.3%)

Lingonberries
1 (2.2%)

Cranberries
3 (6.5%)

Acai (the berry)
3 (6.5%)

Acai (the trend)
25 (54.3%)

Boysenberries
0 (0.0%)

Cloudberries
0 (0.0%)

Red currants
4 (8.7%)

White currants
2 (4.3%)

Black currants
4 (8.7%)

Golden currants
3 (6.5%)

Serviceberries
0 (0.0%)

Honeyberries/Haskaps
0 (0.0%)

Salal berries
1 (2.2%)

Gooseberries
3 (6.5%)

Huckleberries
0 (0.0%)

Thimbleberries
0 (0.0%)

Salmonberries
0 (0.0%)

Marionberries
0 (0.0%)

Ollalieberries
0 (0.0%)

Maypop
0 (0.0%)

Jambutica
0 (0.0%)

Other berry I will state in comments
3 (6.5%)

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I have had boysen, Marion, and ollallieberries in pies, and I've had cranberry jelly and red currant jelly (tasted exactly like cranberry jelly). Not a huge fan of any of them, to be honest.

[princessofgeeks]

Black raspberries and black currants are AWESOME

Fresh wild blackberries off the vines at Granny's lake cabin in the 1970s... also awesome.

[rachelmanija]

My own fresh blackberries are GREAT. Much better than my parents'. Theirs are too seedy.

Native Foods has black raspberries...

[taelle]

I have eaten all colors of the currant! They're very popular on garden plots in Russia. There's a joke/riddle about currants: "Is this one black? No, red! Then why is it white? Because it's green [in Russian green also means unripe]" I'm not that fond of them, though, they're a bit too acid for me (black currant less so than others.

I am also more fond of the smaller black kind of gooseberry than the large green one, it's less acid.

Oh, I also have eaten chokeberry, though I'm almost the only one among the people I know to have a liking for it.

I may have eaten more than I voted for, but I got tired of googling/checking the meaning. And my favoritest berry ever is serviceberry (I learned how it's called in English right now, it's irga in Russian). The only trouble with this one is that birds love it too, so you have to catch the time when it's ripe but the birds haven't eaten it yet.

[rachelmanija]

What is irga like? I've never had it and I can't plant it - it reacts badly with a type of tree I already have a lot of (incense cedars.)

[yuuago]

Those berries you ordered look great! Hope they'll grow well for you.

For "other I will mention in the comments": saskatoons (Amelanchier alnifolia)! Delicious! They taste kind of like blueberries, but have a stronger flavour, and more seeds. Like blueberries but with crunch. :D Not often available as fruit, but lots of people grow the bushes in their yards up here, since they're local and handle the climate well.

[rachelmanija]

The haskaps are not native to my area, but the climate is similar enough that I'm crossing my fingers. Salmonberry, ditto. I have very good feelings about the thimbleberry and salals.

Saskatoons sound delicious! Gee, I wonder where they're from. ;)

[pameladean]

I don't hate the taste of blackberries, but the seeds are awful. I really really don't like acai; to me it tastes like dishwater and I don't like anything about the texture, either.

My mother-in-law used to grow black currants. She had three little bushes, and they obviously had gateways into some other dimension where blackcurrant bushes are about the size of a redwood, because the harvests they produced were terrifying. Fresh black currants are a little overwhelming, but if you are picking them it's hard not to try one once in a while. We would get the call once or twice a year and come down and help her pick all the extant currants, taking more home than we had consented to and making them into jam.

P.

[rachelmanija]

I love the idea of the giant black currant dimension.

I have never tried acai but I feel oddly gratified to hear that it's gross.

[ratcreature]

I've eaten both red and black currants raw. I only tried cranberry raw once because I was curious, but don't care to repeat it. And I actually didn't know anyone ate lingonberry raw, I've only ever seen that as a preserve.

I like the small wild blueberries that are blue throughout more than the big cultivated blueberries that are not blue inside, but the former are really expensive and supermarkets rarely have them. I'm not sure whether they actually go by a different name in English, they might be what's called "bilberry"? Both are called Blaubeeren in my area of Germany. I think the cultivated ones are from an American species, the completely blue ones European. The tiny wild European strawberries are really good too, but also not easy to buy.

[rachelmanija]

I don't think anyone does eat raw lingonberries! I just forgot to specify that prepared counts with them.

I know what you mean with blueberries. The all-blue ones are much better.

[ermingarden]

I love eating fresh elderberries, right off the tree – they commonly grow wild where I grew up. I remember being on a walk with a friend who freaked out when I pulled some berries off a tree we passed and started eating them: She was like, "Don't eat berries off random plants!" And I was like "...but it's not random? I know what it is?"

Picking wild blackberries is so fun, and the excitement makes them taste so good – even though they aren't otherwise one of my favorites.

[rachelmanija]

Hahaha! What do fresh elderberries taste like?

My blackberry bushes have truly vicious thorns. Picking them is an extreme sport.

[adrian_turtle]

I've had black currants, and currants that I don't know if they were white or golden. They were ok, but nothing special. I hesitate to name "my favorite berry" by species when a really good strawberry is better than a really good blueberry, but most strawberries are not that good even for the 12 hours before they start to go bad.

I had fresh boysenberries many years ago. I remember them being mostly seed, but tasty for what you get. Marionberries were quite nice. Mulberries were boring.

I've eaten fresh raw cranberries though most of them are too tart for that to be really rewarding. I like them raw or minimally cooked, chopped with apple or orange as a relish for meat or a stuffing for squash or topping for ice cream or oatmeal.

[rachelmanija]

Yes, there's a huge amount of variance in how good a strawberry can be,

[shadaras]

I am very fond of huckleberries for the memories of picking them off wild bushes while on a camping trip. Not my favorite berry, but one of the ones with the best specific memories associated with them.

[rachelmanija]

There's something really special about foraging food in the wild.

[copperfyre]

One of my favourite berry related memories is just sitting down in a patch of blueberries after slogging through a fen for ages and stuffing myself with them. They were all warm from the sun and I felt like I’d tapped into the joy of being a bear. I have now been ruined for shop-bought blueberries though, because self-picked ones are so much tastier.

I’ve also had cloudberries a few times which are exciting because you need to be slogging through a bog or fen to find them, and they somehow really do taste like apple pie?

Thimbleberries and salmonberries are sometimes really tasty but sometimes just very watery, I find. I guess it’s something to do with how the plant is growing?

[rachelmanija]

Your blueberry experience sounds marvelous. I'm also jealous of your cloudberry experience - I've never had them.

Hmm. I guess I'll find out how my berries taste! My wild blackberries are really good.

[redbird]

Other: black raspberries.

Currants: red.

We had neighbors who grew gooseberries and raspberries, among other things. When they moved away, they sold the house to people who were unfamiliar with both those fruits. The new owners invited us to pick berries from their shrubs. I don't really like gooseberries, but picked some and gave them to my mother.

[radiantfracture]

I've had some very good salalberry jam.

Red huckleberries or blue huckleberries?

[rachelmanija]

I didn't know red huckleberries existed!

What was the salalberry jam like?

[loligo]

Technically I have had a honey berry. Exactly one. From the two bushes that have been growing in my front garden for four years now. ONE BERRY.

Deer are the problem. The first couple years the little twigs I planted weren't big enough to fruit anyway. After the deer ate them down to the ground a couple times that first year, I realized I had to protect them, so I encircled them with mesh fencing and things seemed okay for a few years. Last spring they bloomed and set fruit, and I had maybe 10-20 berries ripening on them.

But my mesh fences didn't have a roof. And just before the berries were ready, some deer came in the night and stuck their snoots right in there and ate all the new growth. They missed one berry.

[rachelmanija]

LOLOLOL NOOOOO. Leaving one berry takes it from tragic to just plain insulting.

I don't seem to have deer in my area. Very odd. It seems like prime deer territory. Maybe the housing is just a little bit too dense.

[james]

As a kid I had a huckleberry bush growing right outside my window and I would pop off the screen and grab some for a snack.

[rachelmanija]

That is so idyllic.

[isis]

Thimbleberries grow lushly wild in my local mountains. They're similar to raspberries but less flavorful and kind of oddly soft. It's like, raspberry drupes explode in your mouth, thimbleberry drupes just sort of squish.

We also have wild strawberries, which are the best and alas have ruined me for commercial strawberries; wild raspberries; and wild huckleberries, which alas seem to rarely flower and fruit nowadays.

[rachelmanija]

Oh dear. That does not sound appealing. Well, if I hate them, the birds can have them.

[zana16]

I like salmon berries and thimble berries, in part because of memories of eating them on hikes. Salal berries aren’t very tasty; not bad but a bit like an interior blueberry. I remember once putting some into a mixed wild berry pie, more for volume and bragging rights about how many kinds of berries were in it than anything else.

[sabotabby]

I really need to learn more about local berries because we have tons and I can't tell any of them apart.

Technically, the best berries are coffee.

I thought you meant ackee, which I know is a fruit and which I quite like, but that is a thing distinct for acai.

The only berries, to my knowledge, that I cannot abide are bananas.

[rachelmanija]

Now you have me wondering if would choose coffee if I could only have one berry.

I don't count "technically a berry" but bananas are revolting.

[luzula]

According to my grandmother, black currants smell like crushed bedbugs. I'm glad that is not a reference I have.

Other berries I have eaten fresh (I am in Sweden): wild strawberries (yum!!), crowberries (insipid), rowan berries (disgusting and nauseating), bilberries (delicious!), Vaccinium uliginosum (insipid), Rubus arcticus (delicious!), Rubus caesius (delicious!), Rubus saxatilis (insipid), elderberries (best made into drinks), blackthorn (very astringent), hawthorn (not that good). Probably more I don't remember.

[rachelmanija]

Hahaha! I will think of the crushed bedbug scent forever.

I envy your berry adventures.

[honigfrosch]

Red currants. They grew in my grandmother's garden.

[mme_hardy]

Red and black currants, never the white, I believe.

[sheafrotherdon]

I have three blueberry bushes in my yard, and the best part of summer is going out there in a morning to pick a handful to eat with yogurt for breakfast.

[rachelmanija]

How marvelous.

[em_h]

When I say I hate strawberries, I must specify that this is only cultivated strawberries. Wild strawberries are fine. Yet ironically, I spent an hour and a half today chopping cultivated strawberries for desserts for the drop-in.

I see I am in broad agreement with everyone else that raspberries are the monarch of berries.

I think I have had all colours of currant fresh except golden (my grandma had a lot of various currant bushes).

[em_h]

I used to climb my grandma's mulberry tree and just sit up in it eating fruit.

I have raspberries growing at the church, and also some currant bushes which are doing okay. A serviceberry tree which has not yet produced any fruit. My father had a huge and well-established blueberry patch at his house on PEI, but then the municipality uprooted it all for a new septic system.

[adrian_turtle]

When I lived in Troy, we could sit on our balcony and eat mulberries from the neighbors' tree.

[musesfool]

I've had lingonberries and red currants in jam, and boysenberries in yogurt.

[rushthatspeaks]

I used to camp in a place where we could pick wintergreen berries in the wild, and I highly recommend them. Minty but not overly so, sweet but not overly so, and with a more complex flavor than the wintergreen flavoring that gets put into things-- kind of like wintergreen, spearmint, and mint all rolled into one. I have no idea why they are not commonly grown, but I've never even seen them in a farmer's market.

[rachelmanija]

Ohhh, I'm going to see if I can find and grow these!