High Bush Cranberries

Years ago, before we increased the size of our goat herd to an efficient brush eating machine, we had lots and lots of high bush cranberries on our farm. You could smell them before you saw them, a unique and easily identifiable aroma leading you by the nose to clumps of juicy red berries.

It's been more than 20 years since we switched from wandering goats to fenced sheep, and I some-times smell the cranberries when I'm on a walk, but when I follow my nose there's never enough to pick. This year, though, while seeking a launch site for our son and his friends to canoe down the Athabasca River, we spotted masses of these berries and later went down with buckets to pick some. Two hours picking, three gallons picked, then three hours cleaning. (A friend later told me I wouldn't have had to clean out the sticks, leaves etc. because I was extracting juice for jelly not making jam! Ah well, never too old to learn!) Extracting the juice took quite a while; got enough for 3 batches of jelly. I now have enough high bush cranberry jelly to last at least 5 years!

     

High bush cranberries have their own special flavour. It's only the cranberry's shape and colour, not the texture or taste, that resembles those cranberries you eat with your Christmas turkey.   If you want wild cranberries that taste like that you have to boing and bounce around on the muskeg and pick the wee little red low bush cranberries that grow there.  Low bush cranberries are sorta like wild strawberries, about a tenth the size of cultivated berries, hard to find, very tiny, very precious.