Wild berry color zen how to#

Lewis and Clark’s journals also noted Native peoples tended to favor salmonberries, thimbleberries, and wild strawberries over salal, eating them fresh because they’re too soft to dry. “Very frequently they pound them and bake them in large loaves of 10 of fifteen pounds,” he wrote, adding the loaves kept “very well during one season.” In their journals, while wintering at Fort Clatsop in 1806 in what’s now Oregon, both Meriwether Lewis and William Clark noted the plentiful salal berries, which Clark compared in size to “buck shot.” Lewis described how Native peoples ate them “when ripe immediately from the bushes” or dried them in the sun or in kilns for later use. But it would also help prevent excessive foraging of huckleberry stands on public lands.”īefore the pioneers, wild berries served as a traditional staple for Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples for centuries. Now, our approach is to try to bring the best traits of huckleberries⁠-that legendary flavor⁠-into blueberries, which are already grown commercially. One could grow them in a controlled environment year round for a specialty market, but it would be at a high premium. They bought seedlings from a native plant nursery, and, “over the years, developed a method to grow huckleberries in a greenhouse. “I was told it was impossible to grow huckleberries outside of their natural environment, that people have tried transplanting them from their place of origin and they do not survive,” Dhingra says, noting the researchers in his lab “are an adventurous group.” When lab manager Nathan Tarlyn proposed the idea of attempting to cultivate huckleberries, “I said, ‘Let’s try that.’” While he hasn’t foraged huckleberries, researchers in his lab have been growing their own for about ten years. Today, Huckleberry Ripple⁠-huckleberry ice cream with a huckleberry swirl⁠-is his favorite flavor at Ferdinand’s Ice Cream Shoppe on the WSU Pullman campus. He first tried huckleberries upon moving to Pullman in 2006. “Their flavor is legendary,” says Amit Dhingra, interim chair of the Department of Horticulture and director of the Genomics Lab at WSU’s College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences.

The same is true for huckleberries, which enjoy a cult-like following throughout the Pacific Northwest. “You would never tell anybody where your patches were.” My grandmother was born in 1883, and she harvested them,” he says. “They go all the way back to pioneer days. LaMonte first picked wild blackberries as a boy in the late 1940s in the South Puget Sound region. It was there in 1991 that Atlantic food writer Corby Kummer tried “one of the best (desserts) I’ve ever been served in a restaurant”⁠-the wild blackberry cobbler. LaMonte founded Northwest Wild Foods in 1988 and soon began supplying trailing blackberries to Anthony’s Restaurants, including Chinook’s at Salmon Bay. If I was going to die of a heart attack, that’s how I’d like to do it. Add a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and you’re just in heaven. “I’d rather have a Little Wild Blackberry pie for my birthday than anything else. “Little Wild Blackberries are like no other berry in the world,” he says. The founder of Northwest Wild Foods in Burlington prefers trailing blackberries, which his company calls Wild Mountain or Little Wild blackberries. Rick LaMonte’s favorite berry is deep purplish black. offers this rhyme to help berry-pickers remember: “White and yellow will kill a fellow.

Wild berry color zen how to#

But if you know where to look, how to recognize them, and which ones to avoid, you can graze through the greenery, turning your summertime treks into wild and wonderful feasts, rich in antioxidants, fiber, vitamin C, and other nutrients.Īccording to the “berry rule,” a general guideline meant to help gauge toxicity, only 10 percent of white and yellow berries are edible 50 percent of red berries are edible 90 percent of blue, purple, or black berries are edible and 99 percent of aggregated berries⁠-those recognized by their clusters, such as blackberries and raspberries⁠-are edible. Others bake beautifully into pies, tarts, and cobblers, or cook down into sweet-tart jams and sauces to top everything from ice cream to thick-cut steaks.įinding wild berries can take patience. Some are so delicate, it’s best to immediately eat them they don’t travel well. From tart to sweet, and deep purple to peachy pink, they come in a rainbow of colors and variety of shapes, sizes, textures, and flavors. Wild berries abound in Washington state in summer and fall.