I’m working to make my woodland area more edible. So I look into all the wild berries that we can grow in the East. On my property, I already have several large black cherry trees. I can climb ladder to pick quite of those. The taste is good, but not super. The wild red/black raspberry tastes sweet. I see wineberry bushes very often, but forget its taste now. There is also a lot of wild blackberry, but they often get blackberry psyllid and I’ve not seen any wild blackberry in the wild. There are also several small trees with clusters of black small berries. They may be elderberries. I’ve never tried those.
I also grow quite a few highbush blackberry bushes and some cultivated blackberry, boysenberry and raspberry varieties.
So my question here is, would all these new wild berries add anything new to what I already have? I can see dewberry and cloudberry similar to blackberry and raspberry. Also huckleberry, serviceberry and chokeberry could be close to blueberry. I’ve not tasted any of those. If all those new wild berries can bring in new and excellent tastes, then I’ll be happy to buy or acquire some of those.
Depending on your budget and free time, you can try lots of things…somebody will certainly sell you something, especially online, and if you do an internet search, ads seem to pop up similar to what you were looking for.
Learning is part of life, you can’t drill a hole in a child’s head and full it with everything that he/she needs to know.
And I can’t answer your inquiry in a couple paragraphs.
I would suggest looking at the harvest time of everything. Try to get a consistent flow of crop throughout the year. Most fruit early, but there are still many that fruit mid and late season. With that you can go anytime and look forward to having something to taste.
I looked at the past posts and questions about some of those wild berries I mentioned above. It seems the general answer has not been that so impressive. So I understand the fun of berry foraging in the wild. Or some of those wild berries really offer new tastes and better nutrients, or more curiosity.
Just try to understand this before going the distance to try those. There are several YouTube videos on picking black cherries. But I’ve not picked many of those. Time may be better spent to collect the black walnuts.
I like to forage wild brambles, but I would not grow them myself. I wanted a forest edge garden at my cottage and needed shade tolerant plants. I used mostly cultivated plants. Ornamental and edible mostly.
Plants like Black Lace and variegated elderberry and such. Variegated beech too. Currants, honeyberries etc.
I’ve had a couple of different serviceberries and lots of different blueberries, as well as some huckleberries. The huckleberries and blueberries are similar, but the huckleberries usually taste better. Though they can fruit in the shade they are small, not that productive, and the wildlife get most of them. The serviceberries look like blueberries but don’t taste much like them. They have their own distinct flavor, though it is definitely a berry taste. My climate, zone 7b in Georgia, is very different than yours which may make a huge difference in what produces for you.
Autumn brilliance is a good tasting serviceberry and worth growing. It’s very ornamental too. Choke berry gets that name for a reason. It is native like the serviceberry though so pretty much problem free
Chokeberry are super sour. Most people use them for jams. If you are the type of person to eat fresh and not a big Jam maker you will not find a use for them. Even if you make Jam out of chokeberry you need something like 1 cup of chokeberry to 1 cup sugar so if you are truly concerned about nutrition when it comes to growing like mentioned in your post it is not for you per say. Cloudberry is very hard to grow. I can’t even find many places in the USA that sell cloudberry. The only place that I found used to sell cloudberry said that it was not good to grow in most of America so they simply don’t sell it anymore. Cloudberry need very cold summers apparently. Huckleberry is very similar to blueberry but huckleberry is far more sour than your normal blueberry. Raspberries are known to grow well but can be hard to get rid of if you ever try to kill them. Of course the answer to growing is you can grow what you want at the end of the day. I think Ross Raddi said it best in one of his videos where he said if you want to grow it generally there is a way but is that way worth your trouble to grow it.
