Most Americans have never heard of honeyberries. A small band of researchers is aiming to fix that.
A fruit enthusiast doesn’t have to search far to find poetic celebrations of nectarines, bananas, apples, peaches, blackberries, watermelons, figs, oranges, or serviceberries. However, the various fine fruity qualities inherent to Lonicera caerulea — also known as haskap, blue honeysuckle, or honeyberry — have yet to inspire a single scribe to wax rhapsodic. Why? Maybe a better question is: Who’s ever heard of a honeyberry?
A small knot of farmers, university researchers, and extension folks in the West and Midwest have been working to boost both the name recognition and ubiquity of this berry that’s native Russia, Japan, and North America. It’s a heavy lift.
There’s no framework yet for standardizing production — best-tasting varieties, will they store, how much will they yield — to transform honeyberries into a commercial crop. There’s only one (retired) breeder in North America to support any new researchers interested in making necessary improvements. Berries picked before their Brix value (a measure of their sugar levels) has peaked at full sweetness can elicit an underwhelmed shrug from a first-time eater. And there’s also the matter of the cedar waxwings; migrating north in spring, they will greedily pick off every ripe berry and leave a grower with none. “I think you are underestimating how evil these birds really are,” one Minnesota farmer told another who’d just recounted the utter denuding of his shrubs on a university podcast.
In fact, it was this podcast that convinced its host, Steffen Mirsky, who’s also the emerging crops outreach program coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to turn some attention to the oblong fruit. An earlier honeyberry episode got a relatively huge number of listens (1,255 versus the usual 300 or so), “which told us there was a lot of interest,” Mirsky said — possibly enough to make the challenges of getting a regional honeyberry supply chain up and running worth the effort.
As it happens, honeyberries have a unique set of attributes. For apple or grape growers who harvest in fall, June-ripening honeyberries can provide a revenue boost just as summer’s starting to hit. “They’re early flowering, but the flowers are cold hardy down to at least 20 degrees Fahrenheit,” Mirsky said. That means they can also support the first bumblebees to emerge when there’s no other food around for them, according to Madeline Wimmer, an extension educator at the University of Minnesota specializing in fruit, who’s been partnering with Mirsky to raise honeyberry awareness with events like farm field days.
Additionally — for the moment, anyway — honeyberries are only slightly vulnerable to spotted wing drosophila and powdery mildew (plus those waxwings); this means they don’t require much in the way of inputs, making them the rare fruit that can be handily slotted into an organic system. Although, said Zach Miller, superintendent of the Western Ag Research Center at Montana State University, “That is a honeymoon that will be over soon; it is an island right now that is relatively uninhabited by pests but as that island grows in size, there will be colonists.”
Unlike blueberries, which they resemble in color if not in shape, they thrive in acidic soils — an additional appeal for farmers in the Midwest. And they’re good for value-add products like jams, ice creams, and wines; can be schlepped to the farmers market either fresh or frozen; and are ideal for a U-pick operation. Said Wimmer, “There’s a lot of directions they could go.”
For apple or grape growers who harvest in fall, June-ripening honeyberries can provide a revenue boost just as summer’s starting to hit.
This wasn’t always evident. Miller’s been running trials of honeyberries in the Intermountain West for the last decade to see, “Would farmers make money off this?” he wondered. Initially, “It wasn’t clear if there was any potential, because the first varieties that came onto the U.S. market, mainly from Russia in the early 2000s, were gross.” They were small and scant and had “kind of a quinine taste, to list their sins.”
They also bloomed way before any bees in the Montana springtime emerged onto the landscape. That honeyberry breeder, in Saskatchewan, along with a second, now-deceased one in Oregon, eventually produced a number of improved varieties, with names like Tundra and Borealis and Indigo Gem. They have big berries, good sweet-tart flavor, and steady ripening so a grower can pick them all at once — shaking the bush with a modified Sawzall works, as does a mechanical blueberry or raspberry harvester.
Since those early days, Mirsky, Miller, and several dozen farmers they’ve worked with on trials have figured out some of the fruits’ finicky particulars. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 plants, spaced 3 to 5 feet apart, fit on an acre, and these take three or four full years to reach maturity. Miller’s back of the envelope math indicates that “8,000 pounds per acre is where you’d want to be to make money,” although he admits this is a rough estimate, based on blueberries and grapes.
For fruit to set, they need fabric stretched beneath their roots to control weeds, as well as cross pollination with other varieties that have comparable flowering times, and if the varieties are too closely related they can’t cross-pollinate. So, for a primary crop of Aurora, say, a farmer needs to plant some bushes of mildly flavored Tundra or slightly bitter Honey Bee. Although, “Anyone who tells you that they know the perfect ratio between harvested varieties and pollenizers is lying and probably trying to sell you something,” Miller said. He’s trialed 16 varieties, some of which, like Indigo, grow low to the ground to make harvesting tricky (better for U-pick). Borealis hangs on to its fruit “so you tear the berries and they don’t store well,” said Miller (better for home gardeners).
After their first three years in the ground, the shrubs grow vigorously and amply — sometimes becoming as wide as they are tall and so laden with fruit that “they flop over,” said Miller. “It would be nice if they stood up a little bit more,” for harvesting purposes. In Wisconsin, Mirsky’s first trials are just hitting the two-year mark and he hasn’t yet assessed things like yield and mature plant size. But in Montana, Miller’s figured out that some varieties can yield 15 pounds of berries per shrub. They can also take a heavy pruning with hedge trimmers and even though this “hurts yields immediately, [plants] rebound after a year,” Miller said. Trellising is another possible fix he’s planning to test out.
Still, bridging the gap between farm and Jamba Juice remains the biggest hurdle in getting these fruits their due.
Perhaps most essential of all is netting to keep the birds out. For individual nets placed over each row, this means spacing plants 10 to 14 feet apart to accommodate the net posts. “Berry plants have been making berries for birds for millions of years; ignore that at your own peril,” said Miller.
Honeyberries can be stored for weeks in a cooler but since they’re soft, both shaking and mechanical picking can damage them, which makes U-pick a way to get them quickly into a consumer’s hands, for about $8 a bucket. “Then there are a few farmer’s market gardeners that have realized that if you have a rack of … honeyberries amongst your other vegetable offerings, you’ll have a much longer line,” said Miller. A frozen berry pack might retail for $10 at the farmer’s market.
Any berry’s nutrients lie mostly in its skin and a honeyberry has extra, due to the fact that it’s really two berries wrapped up in another, outer layer of skin. That means juice shops might be obvious outlets for reaching the sorts of wellness afficionados who embrace açai for its purported antioxidant properties. “For people who are into super fruits this is definitely something that hits home,” said Wimmer.
Still, bridging the gap between farm and Jamba Juice remains the biggest hurdle in getting these fruits their due. “Most people haven’t heard of them and have never put one in their mouth,” said Miller. “But if you can get it in front of them and have them taste it, it’s a pretty easy sell.”
