Honeyberry delights

Taste tests of a lovely early fruit

Honeyberry, previously known as blue honeysuckle, is a shrubby member of the honeysuckle family from Siberia and North Eastern Asia with edible fruit. The wild species has small fruits, often with bitter skins, but lots of traditional breeding work has gone on in places like Canada and Poland has resulted in varieties with no bitterness, larger fruits, more productive bushes etc.

Honeyberry flowers early - usually in March here - but the flowers can tolerate sub-zero temperatures with ease. The fruits ripen from mid May, before most others and look like oval or cylindrical blueberries. The flavour is on the acid side but everyone here agrees they are delicious. One afternoon last week we picked fruits from 8 different varieties to compare flavours. For a few varieties there were only a few fruits so not such a good comparison, but some of these were going to ripen more fruit later.

Our comments on the varieties are below:

Altai - medium sized. Flavour floral, nice sweet-acid mix.

Blue Velvet - large, oval. Quite acid; Bilberry; Grape skins.

Eisbar - small. Ripe damson. Bitter skins.

Indigo Gem (Myberry Farm) - late ripening, medium size. Still a bit sour, skins thick, bitter. Maybe just underripe.

Myberry Bee (Honey Bee) - oblong, heavy crop. Mellow, well rounded flavour; gooseberry; sweet-acid; some bitter aftertaste (not all agreed!)

Myberry Sweet (Borealis) - large, rounded, bloomy fruit, big crop. Blueberry, grass notes, good.

Wojtek - pointed oblong fruit, big crop. Quite sharp; damson; jammy; tangy; “blue raspberry slush”.

Zojka - good crop. Sour; acid; lemony; no bitterness.

The testers (that is, the crew that work at ART) were split 50:50 when it came to naming a favourite, with Myberry Bee and Wojtek coming out top.

Apart from gobbling them raw, we’ve made a honeyberry shrub (a drinking vinegar), some honeyberry jam (flavour ‘in between raspberry and blackberry’) and a mango and honeyberry fruit leather. And there are still some in the freezer!

Honeyberries fill a gap in the fruit calendar so are particularly useful in that respect. They are starting to be grown commercially but are a really easy plant to grow in your garden or food forest. The ART sells plants of all these varieties - the plant list goes live in August, for autumn/winter delivery. See Here for more info.

Thanks to: Caitlin, Ellen, Fran, Martin. Tough having to eat fruit for work……