This time of the year, I start checking on the Blackberries that grow wild around my house-they are just now beginning to ripen. A recent email from a reader of the Blind Pig got me to thinking about the other wild berries that grow here.
Dewberries are similar to Blackberries-in appearance and in taste. Dewberry brambles are smaller than their cousin the Blackberry-Dewberries also have more of a twining vine look to them. Around my house-Dewberries grow in the same areas Blackberries do-as in across the road from each other. Although Dewberries are just as tasty as Blackberries-they don’t usually bear the same quantity of fruit that Blackberries do.
Of all the berries-Blueberries are hands down my favorite. If nothing happens-the ones I have planted in my yard look to hold the biggest harvest I’ve ever gotten-I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed.
Lucky for me-Wild Blueberries also grow around my mountain holler-and they’re all ready ripe. I found the little patch above growing along the bank of Steve’s (my brother’s) driveway-kinda selfish-but I haven’t told anyone else-cause I’m eating them all by myself. And I’m hoping by next year the Wild Blueberry bushes will multiply-then maybe I’ll share my secret.
Huckleberries are similar in taste to Blueberries-but they are much smaller-and don’t get ripe till later in the season. Huckleberries grow all around my holler-but especially up on the ridge behind my house. The little patch above is growing along the trail leading from Pap and Granny’s house to ours. When Chitter and Chatter were younger I used to watch for them when it was time for the school bus-they had a pretty far piece to walk. During the first weeks of school-I knew they’d make pit stops at the huckleberry bushes that grow along the trail-eating their way home.
Another common berry around my house-Gooseberries. I went to the bush I remembered being near Pap’s garage to get a picture-but it’s no where to be seen. I believe the last time the EMC trimmed they must have gotten it. Gooseberries are a greenish color-shaped like Blueberries. They have a sweet taste but not as sweet as Blueberries.
What kind of wild berries grow in your neck of the woods?
Tipper
They are called wineberries. The genus and species is rubus phoenicolasius…they are native to eastern Asia and were brought here in the late 1800’s to cross-breed with domestic raspberries. I’ve come across some wineberry plants growing wild here in southeastern Virginia and they are absolutely delicious.
My father-in-law also calls them shuckberries. He lives in southern Ohio, and they grow all over the place there. Delicious.
We gave blueberries, blackberries, huckleberries, mulberry es that I know of that grow wild, oh also strawberry
We gave blueberries, blackberries, huckleberries, mulberry es that I know of that grow wild, oh also strawberry
In addition to all mentioned above I also have wild black raspberries, mullberries, and ppl say muscadine grows here too. One of my favs is my black raspberries 🙂
Diana-sorry I don’t know a source for the berries. Call your local county extension office or feed store and they might be able to point you in the right direction. Good luck!
Tipper
Blind Pig The Acorn
Celebrating and Preserving the
Culture of Appalachia
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Where can I but a wine berrys or shuckberrys
oh wow, this is so helpful! we were just in north carolina before & after this year’s rainbow gathering in tennesee, & were picking these LOVELY delicious berries & i could only wonder what they were, as i have never seen them in Minnesota, where i am from! up here we have salmon berries (golden raspberries), blackberries, black raspberries, red raspberries, gooseberries, elderberries, wild grapes, mulberry trees::: & up north a littler further you will find the most amazing thimbleberries & saskatoon (june berries) as well as wild blueberries!
anyways, these wineberries or shuckberries, will always stick with me, they are my new favorite apart from thimbleberries, which i DID find in the same area as the wineberries! my daughter loved them in her yogurt! they were the most loving, sparkly, inviting berries i have ever come across:) thanks for all your information,
& i have been also listening to this wonderful playlist ALL DAY!
so much love
grace
Oh, those chuck berries look luscious! I’m going to Kentucky to backpack, and I love berries!
Those berries in question are called wineberries as an earlier poster mentioned. Rubus phoenicolasius is an invasive plant from Asia that now seems to be everywhere in the mid-Atlantic and South. They’re a bit seedy but have a wonderful sweet-tart flavor.
Hey there! What you’re caling shuckberries, I call wineberries. Hope that helps.
I ordered a Baba raspberry plant about two yr. ago. It looks like the mystery berry in the picture .The berries are very small and in clusters.The plant will grow 10’tall and droop from the weight of berries. VERY GOOD BERRY (invasive plant).
We are wearing out the wild blackberry patches right now here in WV. I remember picking huckleberries as a kid in PA also…and teaberries!
Wild,cultivated and gone wild berries are amazing, the range of flavor is a delight to the taste buds. Our berry season has yet to start (okay some strawberries are finally red!) but once it does it is endless until late September and the last of the black berries.
Tipper your berries look so good!! I love all berries but my favorite is strawberries and blueberries and blackberries and raspberries and OH! I love them all.
Now, you’ve got me thinking! We have wild berries here that I thought were blackberries, but maybe they are dewberries? We also have wild plums and muscadines.
I did some more research on the “mystery” berries in the picture…and those I ate the last few days. Pat in East TN is correct. They are wineberries!
I learned that they are native to Korea, Japan, and China. They were introduced in the late 1800s (or got here somehow) and they now stretch all the way up to NH and East Canada…down to the mountains of NC.
They are apparently a “problem”. Invasive plant that is crowding out traditional appalachian native plants.
While its a “problem” the only problem I am having is how to pick them before others on my mountain find them (grin).
We have tons of blackberries that grow on our farm. I planted blueberry bushes, but they are not very prolific. I would love to have some of those wine berries, on our farm, for something different!
My husband has told me that when he was a kid, he and his twin brother would pick blackberries and fill a couple of five gallon buckets. I can’t imagine.
Score on the berries. You can’t beat free yummy fruit!
I hope we get a definite answer on the mystery berry. They don’t quite look like or tast quite like a raspberry. I just literally found some and ate a ton with my wife and boy. YUMMY. What the heck are they?
Mmmmm, I just love berries of all sorts.
We haven’t gone blackberry picking because of the chiggers (red bugs). Speaking of which does anyone know how to treat your yard for them. We have been so overrun we can barely go outside. I’ve raked all the leaves and we spread Bug B Gone, but no help.
Sheryl
Love, love Blueberries!! We have a couple small bushes of huckleberries growing alongside our driveway and blackberries on the other side.
I remember going blackberry picking. We’d follow the creek, have to watch out for snakes, took our trusty collie, Sally, along with us. come back with purple fingers.
Patty H.
Love the post (as usual) and am delighted to see a verification of what I was told those berries are: wineberries! Hubby’s best friend is a “VA Tech serious type farmer” 😉 whose family had farmed for generations and sold at farmer’s markets… Whenever I’m stumped by a plant’s identity I ask him. Eric said his mom called them wineberries.
If I ever get my Mac fixed I’ll be back blogging w/a zillion waiting posts n pics… The one I have ready on making hay includes pics of our wineberries that I stop n eat while changing out hay wagons!
Just wish my blueberries had done better… Enjoy yours!
Blackberry can be quite invasive here. Berries won’t be ripe until midAugust. I have a salmon berry bush in the backyard, the few berries it produces are delicious. Berries look like salmon roe.
I thought my little berries that grow along the edge of the woods were just small black berries but I’d never heard of dewberries so maybe that is what they are. They always seem to grow along with poison ivy!
We expand our strawberry patch a little each year and this year was a great year but very early. We also have wild strawberries that grow all over and if we get to them before the critters we just mix them in with the bigger ones. Berries are one of the best parts of summer!
Tipper: I love to eat the wild berries. We have mostly Black Berries, Elderberries and Black Raspberries in the wild. Black Berries are my favorite.
My son has been picking blackberries every year since he was a little boy. He just loves his pie every summer!!! Since we are in the city, he picks his on any country road he can find.
My Grandma used to take us to Dolly Sods in W.Va. every summer. We would pick huckleberries all day long. It took a long time to fill a bucket, but we thought about the tasty cobblers we would have. I’ve also picked them at Big Meadows on Skyline Dr. in Shenandoah National Park, Va. They do allow you to pick in that one spot each year.
Grandma made jelly/jam out of all the berries you mentioned. Thanks for the graet berry picking memories.
Anastasia-I wish you lived closer and I’d share my berries : )
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Where I lived in western NC, the old-timers used to call those red raspberry looking berries, wine berries. They grew wild on our land, but seemed to move around every few years. They were sweet and very tasty!
We have blackberries here in east TN, along with elderberries.
Since there are no woods in our neck of the woods, there are no wild berries. : )
People around here grow blueberries, dewberries, and blackberries though. I have every intention of digging up my boxwoods and replacing them with blueberries this fall.
I’m not any help to Richard either.
We have wild blackberries and wild strawberries here on the farm. Over where my Dad used to live there grew boysenberries. They are similar in looks and taste to blackberries, but bigger.
If only I could take those berries out of your photos and eat them! I love berries – all sorts. Unfortunately, they don’t grow in Cyprus, so the ones we get are imported from the UK. In Switzerland there are plenty but they usually grow there in late August or early September. As a student in Switzerland, I’d eat all sorts: blackberries, dewberries and blueberries are my favourite but I also love rasberries and gooseberries.
At this time of year in my area, there are cherries, apricots, peaches, nectarines,figs in late July. And , of course, the king of our summer fruit: water melons! But now all sorts of fruit are available all year round at supermarkets. When I was little, each fruit marked a season: oranges, grapefruit and tangerines in winter, strawberries in spring, cherries, apricots, grapes, nectarines, peaches, figs, melons and water melons in the summer, pomegranate in autumn, bananas and apples all year round.
Tipper, I love wild berries.
Blackberries are good, but I’ve been scratched too many times picking them to really want to do it.
Blueberries are my favorites, by far.
Mom and Dad had a great patch of blueberries and Mom loved making fresh blueberry muffins. I loved, loved, loved them.
We sold their old homeplace this spring and this will be the first time in over 25 years that I haven’t eaten big fresh blueberries out of their patch. It’s something that I miss almost as much as I miss them.
All the best,
JD
Looks like Raspberries to me—since we have something similar here in TN. My favorite –hands down–is Blackberries —although I love Raspberries also… Blueberries are my LEAST favorite berry.
Have a great weekend.
Hugs,
Betsy
berries,berries, i love em all. out here in the pacific n.w. we have many of the berries mentioned. but my personal favorite ,are merionberries they are a cross between a boysenberry and a little mountain blackberry, plus the grow great in my back yard. blessings all. k.o.h
Oh did this ever bring back memories of my childhood. Blackberries (Briarberries as we called them) and wild blueberries grew out in the edge of the woods where we lived growing up. Mama and us younguns spent many a day especially during the summertime picking these delicious berries. Sometimes, I think we ate more than ended up in the bucket. Oh what fun we had, even though we did get eat up with redbugs! Thanks for sharing this today!
Hey Tipper: Those huckle berries seem to get ripe here (East TN) at the same time as our blue berries! In fact yesterday we had a combination of them over our morning cereal in the ‘Garden of EVA!’
The last black berry cobbler my mama fixed for my daddy holds such a precious memory for me. After desert daddy told mama, “Well that will be the last cobbler you will fix for me!” Just a few days later he died!
My blueberry patch was created in honor of my THIRD grandson’s birth! Now we have to build a JAMES WIKE FORT around the nine bushes with PVC pipes and bird netting to keep the birds OUT! Yesterday morning we picked two cups of blue berries. One cup we had over our cereal and the second cup I just washed and left on the counter. By mid-afternoon that THIRD grandson and his brothers/mama showed up at my house. I said, “Hey Connor, there is something on the counter especially for you!” When he saw his blueberries his eyes lit up like magic! So berries can be special in all kinds of ways!
Eva Nell
they look like raspberries to me, too. My son picked some last year that looked exactly like those. They were delicious. We have the blueberries, dewberries, blackberries and raspberries here. We have these wild strawberries that keep growing in our yard. I read somewhere where they taste better than regular strawberries, so we ate one. I didn’t like them at all, didn’t seem to have any taste to it. My tame blackberries got hit hard with a couple of freezes this past spring and my crop is going to be a lot skimpier this year. I love picking blackberries!
Love the berries……
Looks like a wild red raspberry
to me…
We have a non-native (Japan-China) invasive berry (1830)called the Autumn Olive…the berries ripen in the fall and are at their tastiest after the first light frost, if you can get them before the birds…
They were planted for wildlife habitat and reclamation of strip mines and shelterbelts….
I have made jelly and sauces with the berries…
They are high in locopene and said to be 18 times as much lycopene as tomatoes….
But the shrub can get out of hand…there are a few folks out there premoting the value although invasive of the health benefits of the berry…
My neighbor down the road has a small stand of wild Albino Blackberrys…very rare…I am hoping to borrow a few ripe seeds and or a side cutting and try to start some…
We have wild blackberries, wild black raspberries, dewberries, and on the hill very short bushes of wild blueberries…of course one of my favorites..is the Mulberry but can never get many because of the birds…There are huckle berries around here but not on our place….
We have a berry like Richard’s — all I know is that it’s some kind of raspberry.
Lots of blackberries and wild raspberries around here. Some wild strawberries and lots of elderberries (wine or jam.)
I have picked blackberries, dewberries, gooseberries, strawberries but never blue berries. i did not know they grow wild. I love all of the above with blackberries 1st and strawberries 2nd. when daddy used to put me in a strawberry field in KY, I put one in my bucket and one in my mouth. yum and thanks for the memories.
Great post! Wild berries are such a treat. I’m from eastern Oklahoma and we always had a lot of wild grapevine and strawberries around my house.
I’m afraid I’m no help to Richard.