Haskap Berry Frustration

The haskap or honeyberry is presently not well known in the U.S.  If you're interested, I wrote a blog post last year (you can find it here) on their origin and desirable qualities.  Papa Pea and I are always eager to pursue any edible product we can grow right here on our own little homestead that offers us high nutritional value so when we came across the haskap berry plant which is purported to have a higher antioxidant value than the blueberry (which we already grow and enjoy), we decided to try them.  Besides that, we're always ready to try a fruit that can be grown in our short-season location.

This is the first year our four-year old haskap berry plants have produced enough berries to constitute a real harvest.  The bushes are lush, beautiful and healthy.  However, our enthusiasm for the berries is . . . waning.

The berries need about ten days more to fully mature after they turn a dark blue color.  An indication of the ripeness of the berry is when you see a few under the bush which have fallen off.  I think we waited at least three weeks, rather than ten days, before this happened.  We kept taste testing a berry here and there to see if the flavor was changing.  Nope.  Just as terribly sour (picture ugly face here) as when first sampled.

Supposedly they mature before strawberries grown in the same location.  Not ours.  Our strawberries came in about four weeks ago and our haskap berries were harvested just this week.

The information we keep trying to gather seems conflicting.  One source says they bear over a 2-3 week period.  Another says a desirable characteristic of the berries is that they all ripen at once making harvest much easier.  How's that for creating confusion?

Picking the haskap berries is not clean and easy.  The berries are mostly "hidden" down inside the leafy bushes, and it's a game of hunt and seek to find them all.  They are very wet and juicy (no, the bushes weren't wet when we picked them) resulting in fingers and hands stained with juice after picking.

The cleaning task is much more difficult than with blueberries.  Removing any remaining stems (of which there were many) results in half the insides of the berry being pulled out with the stem.  The juice stains any cloth with which it comes into contact.  Really stains.  Even commercial stain remover didn't begin to remove the stain.  Fortunately, the stain did come off my hands!

The final taste test:  Still sour and unpleasant.  I could never eat a bowl of haskaps the way I do a bowl of blueberries.  

We got somewhere between two and three quarts of the little undesirable sour pods of poison gems from our three bushes.  I froze them for use this winter.  Would they make a delightfully delectable jam?  Perhaps.  Our daughter who has made some wonder cordials with fruit in the past wants to take them for that use or possibly to try a small batch of wine.  In some of the information I've seen, they are touted as making excellent wine.  Could be, but I'm reserving judgment on that until I can see (or taste) the proof in the pudding.

Well, as they say, there are no failures in gardening, only experiments.  To date that's all I have to report on our experiment in growing haskap berries!