Positive reinforcement…
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For me… honeyberries have been disappointing… in a few ways…
Got my first ripe ones this year… in year 4… and only got a few and none have really tasted good yet.
I have strawberries that ripen before during and after them… and I like strawberries a lot better.
As my honeyberries start ripening… my goumi berries really kick in (red gem) and they taste much better than the honeyberries I have got so far.
Honeyberries turn a ripe color, a week or two before they are actually ripe and supposed to taste good… well that is somewhat of a pain too… If they all started ripening at the same time, you could sort of keep up with which ones to try next… but when they don’t… it is really just a shot in the dark at whether you are picking one that might taste good or not.
For those reasons… I may just replace mine with something I like much better and can depend on producing much fruit… a black or gold raspberry perhaps, or a couple more blue berries.
One of the main reason I was giving my honey berry so much time (4 years to fruit)… was I was hoping they would ripen early, before strawberries… but now that I know strawberries ripen here a couple weeks before any honeyberries do… that puts honeyberries way down my list of want to keeps.
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Honeyberries have a cult like following because they are one of the few plants that are so easy to grow…in cold climates. They aren’t too fussy, and they can take a lot of abuse. They also are kind of sweet (although my wife thinks they taste like vinegar). The honeyberries are competing with currants (tastes like earth), gooseberries (tastes like a sour grape and has thorns), bush cherries (sour and slow growth), raspberry (ripens later in the season), among others. Given that competition, you can see why honeyberries are so great.
You live in the Garden of Eden. You can grow pretty much everything that exists without even trying. I can see why honeyberries would come off as a disappointment. What cultivars are you growing?
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@Moose … I have blue sea and blue pagoda from OGW.
Just tried 3 more berries… juicy tart… a little sweet but not much. Better than nothing… but no where near strawberries or even goumi.
The first two years here they lost leaves… thought they died… but they did come back the next spring.
They are looking much better now.
Think I will just leave them… I have plenty of other places to start other stuff.
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Honeyberry (Beast, Beauty, Maxine) has been a little bit of a struggle for me so far in 7A. Not because I don’t like it. I actually like the berries i’ve gotten quite a bit. They’re juicy and tart which I enjoy.
They don’t like it here and part of that just might be my particular site. Keiko actually died. Production is declining instead of increasing with the remaining 3. They get 5.5 hours of sun a day (8am-1:30pm shielded from the hottest afternoon hours) currently. I’ll probably move them out of prime real estate and into a spot that only gets 4 hours of morning sun a day. They might end up liking it better there anyway.
I think it’s a good berry. If it didn’t need to hang on the bush for so long to ripen well i’d really love it. The birds figured it out right away whereas they still don’t know what to do with goumi.
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So the two varieties you have there could be called Blue Sea Vinegar and Blue Pagoda Vinegar. Unless you are a honeyberry collector, no one really gets those varieties.
Get Blizzard, Beauty, and Beast. Blizzard is the best.
Others will say Aurora is the best but it’s “early blooming” so probably wouldn’t work that great for you.
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There was some discussion earlier in this thread about pollinator partners for Strawberry Sensation. I tried to pay a little attention this spring to what bloomed at the same time, so here are my impressions from Zone 5 Southern Vermont after a slightly milder than average winter (-15F) and a somewhat slow to warm up spring.
Strawberry Sensation is definitely one of the late bloomers, and probably best pollinated by Maxine Thompson’s Japanese varieties. But although it starts blooming later, it does have decent overlap with the Boreal series from USask. There was very little overlap with the “early” Russian varieties, although Berry Blue/Czech 17 did keep blooming long enough that there probably would have been some pollination happening.
In general, my conclusion (at least for this year in my zone) is that the Bloom Chart from HoneyberryUSA is pretty accurate as far as the order things bloom, although (at least for this year) my Early’s and Mid’s were fairly simultaneous (~May 7-10). The Late’s peaked about a week later (~May 14-17). The later USask varieties (like Boreal Beauty) had a reasonable number of flowers in common earliest of Thompson’s varieties (Solo and Kawaii), but Thompson’s varieties and Strawberry Sensation should ideally be considered a separate pollination group.
(I don’t have Blue Moon/Blue Sea, which Bernis shows as even later)
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i have a cousin that lives in K.Y that has some of the later fruiting ones from Maxine Thompsons breeding and says the same as you. sour with little taste. its kind of like us with peaches. they struggle to thrive here and the fruit never gets real sweet because there isnt enough heat. i believe honeyberry, currants and gooseberries prefer it in the colder regions they came from and maybe need that shorter season to concentrate their growth. im speculating from what ive seen and heard. my wife rarely eats fruit but she will eat any honeyberries i give her. they are that good. if you were raised on more sour fruit as we have you will think these are sweet compared to someone raised on peaches, pears and sweet cherries.
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@steveb4 … I bet you are right about that.
Mine are not bad… I can eat them… but so far a couple notches below goumi.
@Moose … no mention of vinegar in the catalog I ordered from. I picked those two with no help (b4 I found this forum) and was hoping what OGW was saying about them would come true.
They were both listed as late bloomers and I selected late because of my late frost issues.
Perhaps if someone grew them in a more northern location… they would be large sweet flavorful…
That has not worked out here in southern TN.
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Yea I see that. Nurseries always tend to over exaggerate their plants…especially if they were involved in that cultivar’s creation.
How about this- call Honeyberryusa right now and see if they will ship you a blizzard. I think yesterday was their cutoff for shipping. See if you can get them to ship it now. Get the largest size blizzard they have available. Plant it right in between your existing honeyberries. You can consider those two existing plants to be your pollination stock for the blizzard. Blizzard should be late blooming. Give it a good 2-3 years and see if you like the flavor.
If it’s still bad then you can dig them out and mail them to me and I’ll buy them from you.
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Thanks for the recommendation on honeyberry @Moose…
I made a note of that in my “list of things to try next time” notebook.
I won’t be starting anything else new this year, not here at this place. We are hoping to build a new home, relocate, sell our BIG house… downsize for retirement… but with all this crazy cost of building materials we have that on hold for now. Once we make up our mind and get that done, i will be starting over at a new location and I will sure consider trying a blizzard then.
I have a long list of recommendations for my new location and added yours to that list for honeyberries.
Can you recommend a pollination partner or for blizzard ?
When I do retire… there is no telling what all I will grow 
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Goumi reminds me of tomatoes sprinkled with Cayenne pepper powder.
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Has anyone tested borderline shade conditions for growing honeyberries? I am wondering what the least amount of sun that would be worthwhile for growing honeyberries in zone 5? Would 2 hours of hot direct sun produce a crop?
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Honeyberries, like sour cherries, are best cooked. I freeze them raw, then put them in oat bran with stevia and water, nuke it, and pour on milk it for breakfast each day. I’m not that wild about them raw. Great in baked goods, too.
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Last year was the first year that I got any berries and they all ripened late, after my strawberries. This year they are ripening earlier than my strawberries.
I make jams and jellies. My plan for this year is a strawberry-honeyberry jam I’d also like to try peach-honeyberry, if they are still coming on when my peaches are ripe.
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Those two bushes you have now will work. You will want a “late blooming” variety as the pollinator. Blizzard, beauty, and beast are usually sold as a series.
There are also the Maxine Thompson varieties. Those were developed in the Corvallis OR area and are 100% pure Japanese and might be better suited for less cold areas. They won’t have the zing / tangy zip that the Russian cultivars have. I have a few of these cultivars, but haven’t tasted the fruit yet so can’t opine on the flavor.
just got 2 strawberry sensations from honeyberry USA. hardening them off then planting near boreal blizzard. beauty, and beast.
got a pic, how big were they?
no i dont. about average for them 6’’- 8’’. ive ordered their xl for $5 more and got nice 18’’ plants but they dont offer them that size often. most have been between 6-10in.
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My “willa” from Honeyberry USA is blooming…but since others are past fruiting…it’ll be in vain. (Unless that one proves to be self fertile.)