• Dasus@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores,

    Visit the Nordics in June-July.

    Markets full of them.

    Hell, you don’t need to buy any, just walk into any forest and start picking.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      First, note that there are a number of plants called the “huckleberry”.

      My guess is that @daltotron@lemmy.world has good odds of talking about Vaccinium membranaceum. I’ve had that in Idaho, and consider it to be pretty good.

      People pick it in the wild, but it hasn’t been successfully domesticated. Much of the plant lives underground, and it depends on very specific conditions that are hard to reproduce on farms. You can buy some wild-foraged berries, but they’re a pain to get, so available for limited periods of time and relatively-expensive.

      I don’t believe that those grow in Europe, and in fact, looking online, the name “huckleberry” only showed up in the Americas, after European colonists misidentified an American berry as the European-native “hurtleberry”. You might be thinking of a different type of berry; googling, I don’t see people talking about huckleberries in the Nordics.

      We also have a plant called “huckleberry” around the Bay Area in California, Vaccinium ovatum, which is easier to find in the wild, grows larger and more (albeit smaller) but a lot less impressive, in my experience.