How many of you go out in search of these little gems? I missed the peak at the cabin last year and found out we just finished out last jar of Highbush Cranberry jelly. The stuff is amazing and likely the only thing a person can do with those sour little suckers with a hard black pit.
They ripen on an average year right about Labor Day, give or take a week. The bushes can reach about 8 feet and seem to be a random plant, but one can find several growing within a few feet of each other at times. I’ll take a drive in early June when the bushes flower and mark them with a small piece of white trail tape and note where the bush is at in a notebook. This makes finding the bushes back in the fall much easier. I suppose a GPS could be used too. The round berries are in clusters of up to about 50 berries, are a bright red and maybe 1/4″. We generally try to fill a 5 quart ice cream bucket with them. After rinsing them off well we will add about 4 cups of water to a large kettle along with the berries and put the heat on just high enough to simmer the berries until the have all popped, then the mixture gets poured through a colander with a double layer of cheese cloth inside to catch the skins and seeds. The whole shooting match is left to drain well, then the cheesecloth gets the ends gathered up and squeezed lightly to extract the last of the juice from the mass. The juice is measured as one would fresh raspberry juice for jelly and the same identical raspberry jelly recipe is used. The resultant jelly is a fire red and has just enough tang to make spit. Its a super good jelly with a taste all of its own, but again, sort of similar to the raspberry product.
I think of all the berry jellies I have made over the years the High Bush Cranberry is right at the top. I just wish we had more of the wild plants here in the SE of the state. The cabin is in the Two Harbors area and the bushes grow well up there and the birds that feed on the berries do a nice job of relocating the seeds for new bushes to start. I throw the seeds from the juice extraction out in the woods and some new plants have actually gotten started that way, but I think mice and voles get most of them. This year I am bringing home some berries to dry, then freeze, then plant the following spring. I’d love to get a whole fence line full of them along the park land behind the house.
If you know where a few bushes are, try making a batch of this jelly. I’d be willing to bet it would become one of your favorites.
