Huckleberries!

It’s huckleberry season in the Kootenays! Add in a two-year-old, and the fun multiplies. Handling the supply of honey buckets on the trip up the mountain in the backseat of Grampa’s truck occupied her endlessly!

It didn’t take her long to get the idea of how to find berries. (Grampa did check the area to make sure there weren’t other berries that were poisonous.) Though she did prefer to eat berries out of her mom’s bucket.

We’d brought along two berry pickers, aka berry rakes. The idea is that you rake the contraption up through the bushes and it picks the berries for you. Also picks a lot of leaves and twigs!

After an hour we’d collected several buckets of huckleberries and headed back to the truck. I’m amazed this child’s face isn’t more stained after all she ate! (Notice she’s showing me the ones in her mouth…)

Later, at home, I dumped a bucket at a time into a large bowl and filled it with water. Most of the leaves and twigs float to the top, making the process of cleaning the huckleberries for the freezer an easy (if a bit time consuming) task.

Huckleberries taste like a more alive version of blueberries, and they’re our favorite forage. What do you forage for?

We now have two one-gallon ziplocs of huckleberries in the freezer. We like them in pancakes and in sauce on ice cream. How do you like huckleberries or blueberries?