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Post by plantsnobin on Jun 8, 2008 8:09:27 GMT -5
Taste like crap. I planted 'Autumn Brilliance' last year, and it has produced nicely this year. Ate one yesterday, won't bother again. On the plus side, the tree does have lovely blooms and nice fall foliage. I'm sure the birds might like them, so that is good enough for me. I also have a shorter one, don't remember the name and label has faded, also nothing worth eating. The Aronia is loaded with fruit, at least you could make juice with it. All of them are nice ornamentals worth planting for looks alone.
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Post by canadamike on Jun 8, 2008 8:22:06 GMT -5
It is the first time I hear that. It must not be a good tree ( cultivar), because usually you can fool people into thinking they are blueberries, They really are delicious. It is darn early for them...what color was the fruit...I hope you did not eat them red, although I read somewhere there where such cultivars.
Looks like an unrippen fruit to me my dear....
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Post by utopiate on Feb 2, 2009 21:37:23 GMT -5
Have a lot of native service berries around here. Highly variable fruit since they are all seedling in origin. Some are quite nice, plump, juicy and delicious, others I wanna spit out. You have to find the right shrub with the fruit you like. Amelanchier alnifolia here mainly, but one is probably a different species since it blooms later and has a different form.
I've been reading there are a lot of natural polyploid serviceberries out there. I will look for some near seedless types this season. The fruit often dries on the bushes here in summer and the sweet ones make a fairly good serviceberry raison pulled off the bushes in late summer. I wonder if a triploid serviceberry would produce a good dried product.
I've experimented a bit with them cooked. Very odd. I mix a bit of water with them and run them raw through the blender at low speed to mash the pump and free the seeds. They then screen out fairly easy and it leaves a thick jell at room temperature. Unfortunately this jelling doesn't seem to carry over to a cooked product. I usually mix them with raspberries or other fruit as a sort of fruit sauce or sweeten it to a sort of jam. Makes good fruit leather this way poured out and spread to dry. Cooked by themselves, they are ok, but I don't use them that much. Its more of a filler for me, since it seems such a shame to see such loads of fruit not being used in some way.
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Post by plantsnobin on Feb 2, 2009 21:51:35 GMT -5
I am holding out some hope for finding a decent tasting berry. I have seeds for 5 different species coming so I can trial them. At least if I don't like them, the birds do. And they do make nice ornamentals.
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Post by utopiate on Feb 3, 2009 0:48:48 GMT -5
I have only one selected strain.. the Smokey one. It has what I would call a very good flavor for a serviceberry, and didn't seem to have many seeds. If you don't like that one.. serviceberries probably just aren't to your taste. There is a bit of an almond (cyanide?) taste in the seeds, and some are way seedier than others. Perhaps this is what you dislike the most. The Smokey doesn't have much of that and few seeds. However, its not that much different than any of the really good tasting serviceberries we already have growing around here wild. If you find some good flavored ones and change your mind about how you feel for the fruit, I can send you seeds this summer of what I think are really good ones... but if they cross pollinate with poor tasting bushes (often right near them) who knows what you will get. I hear they can be hard to clone.
Autumn brilliance as a name makes me wonder if that one was selected for fall color rather than fruit quality.
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Post by grunt on Feb 3, 2009 3:52:53 GMT -5
Karen: I don't think you are going to find a particularly good tasting one from the commercial varieties. Try and find a wild one that you like the taste of. Most of the commercial varieties were bred for pretty, not tasty, and trace their roots back to a British attempt to import them into the UK. They didn't do well there (due to climate) in their original form, so they worked on them until they would grow there, but lost the taste in the process. At least that is my understanding of it.
That said, even the commercial ones can have reasonably good taste given the right growing conditions. I don't know all of the requirements, but do know that the best tasting ones usually seem to be growing with wet feet all the time. (or so memory says - - - swamp running as a kid). ;D
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Post by utopiate on Feb 3, 2009 11:34:00 GMT -5
Most of the available selected strains in North America seem to come from Canadian efforts. I think Alberta has had a sustained effort to produce fruiting selections for some time now, serviceberry being valued as a very hardy native fruit there traditionally. A number of such selections are featured in garden catalogs here. Smokey, Northline, others I shoud look up. That said, I must state that many of the wild plants are quite good and probably indistiguishable in their own right. The best eating ones I am familiar with are in interior continental climates. These such as Amelanchier alnifolia probably are not adapted to wet conditions or maritime climates. They dot the arid hillsides here in shrub steppe environments. There is a Pacific serviceberry of the coastal NW which is adapted to a maritime rainy environment. I don't think it tastes as good though. Eastern North America has lots of Amelanchiers that must be adapted to wetter climates. Perhaps northeastern region plants would do well there. Wish I knew how they tasted.
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Post by stevil on Feb 3, 2009 11:55:37 GMT -5
The fruit often dries on the bushes here in summer and the sweet ones make a fairly good serviceberry raison pulled off the bushes in late summer. I wonder if a triploid serviceberry would produce a good dried product. I also pretty much only use serviceberries dried and really like the flavour, less so when fresh, but I still nibble on them. I use them in the winter on home made oat muesli mixes, sometimes on their own, but mostly mixed with other dried berries – bilberries (wild collected), apples, plums, blackcurrants, gooseberries etc. This is the berry that the birds (mainly Fieldfares and Starlings) are most crazy over, so I have to net the bushes to have a chance… I think this is partly because these are one of the first berries to ripen (late July in a good year). I have a number of species and one large-fruited variety – Thiessen. This reminds me of one of the original impulses that got me into collecting unusual edibles. As a student in the early 80s I attend a conference in Halifax, Canada. Didn’t have much money and wanted to travel around a bit in Canada. As I got a fixed rate for accommodation and food without a receipt, I arrived at the airport and asked the taxi driver to take me to the camp site, saving money on the hotel… The next day I contacted a bike shop to rent a bike, but they didn’t have any left. I asked him if there was anyone else, told him where I was staying and he told me to give one of his friend’s a call who lived near the campsite – he might be able to rent me a bike. Well, they did loan me a bike, and probably feeling sorry for me staying at the campsite invited me over for dinner. It then turned out that he was attending the same conference, they were really keen gardeners and that day I helped them harvest Serviceberries from a tree in their garden – I remember that we used a ladder, so it was quite a big plant. At the time I’d never heard of using Serviceberries for food, mainly used as an ornamental over here. I spent the following weekend with them and they drove me around the island. They had a vegetable garden on the other side of Nova Scotia where they also took me. We kept in contact for a few years afterwards and they sent me various vegetable seed. Never occurred to me at the time to ask for some seed of that Amelanchier, but I searched for years afterwards for large-fruited cultivars without success more or less until the Internet opened a new world… I think that this is one that I might even have grown even if it hadn’t been edible, they are fantastic when in flower, although it doesn’t last long….  |
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Post by ottawagardener on Feb 3, 2009 12:34:29 GMT -5
The city of Ottawa has a tree program and Serviceberry is one of those that are offered for free (one tree a year I believe it is). I should find out the cultivar to see if it is worth planting but I had intended on trying out this free tree.
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Post by utopiate on Feb 3, 2009 17:55:48 GMT -5
These truly were one of the most important berries for Native American here in former times. Vast quantities were dried for winter use here. Its very productive but soon stripped by birds as Stevil notes. Bears absolutely love them here and deer eat the leaves. In early summer I often gorge on them as I'm hiking, they often remind me of juicy grapes, quite sweet, and good. The bad ones can be bad though. Selecting the right bush is well worth taking the time to do.
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Post by utopiate on Feb 4, 2009 19:07:58 GMT -5
Nice pic of blooming serviceberries.
Did anyone else hear the story that they are called serviceberries because they bloomed when the ground was thawed enough for graves to be dug and services held?
Other common names: Juneberries, Shadberry.
It seems like a lot of the wild plants can be natural polyploids.
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Post by mnjrutherford on Apr 10, 2009 6:28:09 GMT -5
We have 2 serviceberries, both purchased through Arbor Foundation. I've never found any other data on them. Our first bush died due to drought, but the second one, planted out a year later is doing quite well. How many years in ground before we can expect fruit?
I wouldn't mind starting 2 or 3 more from seed if someone would send me the seed. I'm also willing to trade chocolate pecan quaresmali.
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