at Mon, 06 Sep 2004 16:40:48 GMT in <cjfullerSPAMORAMA-
>,
(Cindy Fuller) wrote :

>SO and I went hiking near Mt. Baker yesterday. Kind of muddy, but the
>highlight was the plethora of wild huckleberry/blueberry bushes along
>the trail. We grazed on the way up, then picked a quart of them on the
>way back down. They'll go very well with ice cream tonight.
>
The blueberries were out in full force at Cascade Pass on August 15. This
year seems to have been a good one for them. Inexplicably, I was the only
one (of multiple groups) actually picking the berries. Go figure.

The best ones are the low-growing ones with the largish, oval, silvery
blue-green leaves. The flavour of the berries off this type are literally
as if you compressed an entire punnet of cultivated blueberries into a
single berry. Most of the rest of the other lowbush varieties are good,
too. The highbush varieties (usually found at slightly lower elevations
along the trails, where forests begin) generally aren't quite as good as
the lowbush ones. However, there is the black huckleberry (really the only
one of the many vaccinum spp. bushes in the Pacific NW that has a logical
claim on the designation "huckleberry") which is excellent, bettered only
by the best of the blueberries I described above.

Oddly, in the Pacific NW the term "huckleberry" seems to be used
interchangeably by a lot of people for blueberries. I figure, if it's a
blue, small-seeded vaccinum species, it should be called a blueberry.
Otherwise you're making arbitrary designations. The black huckleberry is
never blue, and so I think the term huckleberry is appropriate, but for the
others, I think it's confusing. However, in some ways, who really cares as
long as they taste great?

--
Alex Rast

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