Dewberries in Bloom

It's that time of year again. Dewberry season. The wood is filled with big white blossoms that will become juicy berries in only a few weeks. In the years when we have rain over the two weeks before the buds open, we get extra large flowers, followed by extra large berries.

Dewberries grow as runners along the ground. They have both male and female plants and grow as biennials, putting forth new growth from the roots one year, and producing berries on the previous year's growth.

Blackberries produce more berries in less space, but they can get out of hand. In Oregon, most blackberries are treated as noxious weeds. They produce impenetrable hedges of thorny brambles and grow rapidly in moist areas. Like blackberries, dewberries are considered a nuisance in many areas, where they are invasive and difficult to control. However, dewberries tend to grow on single canes along the ground at a height of no more than eighteen inches. Dewberries were once heavily cultivated and were preferred because they had fewer and smaller seeds than blackberries. These days, dewberries are rarely seen in markets and the blackberries found in stores are grown in Mexico.

Most of our land is left wild, for the birds and animals, and much of that area hosts patches of dewberries. Deer and birds are particularly fond of the delicious fruits and take what they want. We pick over five gallons every year, yet plenty of berries go to waste, feeding the soil and planting new seeds.

Ticks and mosquitoes, heat and humidity, and aching backs limit how much we pick each year, but we still get more than we can eat. Most of the berries we pick are used for a kind of informal barter. We give someone a couple of quarts of fresh berries and later in the summer, they give us something they have in abundance. It works out very well.

Kathy is cleaning out a flat, clear area between us and the denser forest to our north, where we plan to try cultivating dewberries and hope to train them on a trellis for less backbreaking work in picking.

Dewberries make wonderful pies, jellies, smoothies and infusions. Their leaves can be picked and dried for use making a delicious tea. Berry leaf teas such as strawberry, blackberry and blueberry were available in stores thirty or forty years ago, but now berry flavored black or green teas are more common.

As soon as the berries begin to ripen, Ben will make a big batch of yogurt and bring it down when he comes to help pick berries.

Ah, the little joys of summer! Maybe I'll make some dewberry infused sweet tea.

Stephen P.