I love that over time our year is marked by little things like when the red huckleberries are ripe. B is always the first to notice when they are ready, and we all savor the tart little berries.
I remember how amazed I felt when I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, and saw huckleberries all over the woods in this area. Being able to walk into the forest and pick berries to eat felt a bit surreal to me, I had never experienced that before.
The red huckleberries ripen earlier in the season, and then the blue and deep purple ones usually ripen in late summer and fall. The red ones are tart, and the later ones are sweeter. We love them all.
I don’t think I’ve ever had much of a “huckleberry harvest” picture to share with the red huckleberries until this year. The harvests are usually a handful here and there. (That top picture is from June this year, and the other two were from years back.)
This year we brought in a little bowl full of them and that felt like a treasure. There were more red huckleberries out there this year than we had ever seen before, it was a good year for them.
Our favorite bush to harvest from is growing out of a tree stump and is hard to reach. With the help of a ladder, we were able to harvest that little bowl. (Clearing away some of the blackberries overtaking the area would have helped us reach more too, there is always plenty of blackberry clearing to do about the place.) The rest are for the birds to enjoy.
What berries grow wild where you live? What are your favorites to gather?