Mad about Science: Huckleberries

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Staff

Idaho’s state fruit is a thing of natural wonder. Steeped in a sense of legendary mysticism, you hear locals talking about hucks (but never sharing their picking patches) and visitors leaning in to eavesdrop on any juicy details about the delectable morsels.

Did you know that students from Southside Elementary in 2000 were responsible for pitching the huckleberry as the state fruit to legislators? I’m pretty sure I was powerleveling my Feraligatr in Pokémon Silver on Gameboy Color at that time, but you know, priorities!

The Huckleberry is a truly unique plant. Believe it or not, there are actually a wide variety of huckleberries throughout the United States. The particular variant in our backyard is Vaccinium membranaceum, commonly called thinleaf huckleberry, tall huckleberry, big huckleberry, mountain huckleberry and black huckleberry. None of these other names are wrong, so if you hear folks arguing about the etymology of our local berry, let them go at it: that gives you plenty of time to pick more for yourself.

Huckleberries, particularly the kinds that grow around here, are tricky to domesticate. They are very particular plants and require a specific set of conditions to thrive. Huckleberries love acidic soil, which is found in literal spades around here. They also require adequate snowfall to insulate their roots from hard freezes, but like a long cold period to stimulate bud growth. Additionally, they take as long as 15 years to produce their first crop. Blueberries, meanwhile, can go from seed to production in fewer than five years. Economically, it makes very little sense to produce large-scale domesticated huckleberries unless people are willing to pay an arm and a leg for something they could acquire for free in the wild.

Keeping all of that in mind, a responsible huckleberry picker is one that only gathers what they can realistically consume in order to save enough berries for wildlife and other people. Collecting huckleberries with the intent to sell is strictly prohibited. It’s also bad practice to strip a bush bare, as that will reduce the chance the bush will survive, thrive or propagate new generations of huckleberry into the future. As is true of everything in nature, take only what you need.

Huckleberries ripen during the summer. Unlike blueberries or June-bearing strawberries, hucks will vary their time of ripening throughout the season with fruit at the lowest elevations ripening as early as June, and higher elevations as late as September. This ensures plenty of food for birds and bears throughout the season and gives the plants a wider range. 

If you’re ever in doubt when it comes to huckleberries — where to find them, how many to pick or what safety precautions you should take while searching and picking — stop by your local Forest Service ranger station. The rangers have all of the most up-to-date information about huckleberries and the animals that eat them. You can find the Sandpoint Ranger Station on 1602 Ontario St., open between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. every weekday. They’ll give you much better information than anything I could share in this article.

Huckleberries exist in different forms all over the U.S. Eastern huckleberry is largely found south and east of the Mississippi River, while western huckleberry is unsurprisingly found throughout the Rockies and most of the West Coast. Red huckleberry, V. parvifolium, can be found in British Columbia, California, Oregon and Washington, and is known to be more bitter than the hucks found around here. Evergreen huckleberries, V. ovatum, are found along the Pacific Coast, though their bushes aren’t nearly as plentiful as the ones you find in the Idaho panhandle. This variety produces a dark black fruit in the fall that’s loaded with antioxidants.

Some plants masquerade as huckleberries to the untrained eye. Black nightshade berries are approximately the same size as your average huckleberry with a midnight-black skin. These berries are edible for some, but always carry the possibility of an allergic reaction. The plant looks similar to deadly nightshade, which should never be consumed.

One piece of advice every successful mushroom forager will tell you rings true for berry picking as well: If you’re not 100% certain of what it is, don’t put it in your mouth!

Black nightshade isn’t native here, and has been introduced from Eurasia. An easy way to differentiate black nightshade from huckleberries is to look at how the fruit grows. Huckleberries cluster close to the stem like blueberries, while black nightshade produces little stalks that lift the berry away from the stem. These stems sometimes have a leafy crown around the top of the black nightshade berry.

You may be wondering at this point if huckleberries aren’t economically farmed and you can’t commercially sell what you gather, how do so many huckleberry products end up on shelves? How are huckleberry shakes so popular? 

It’s very likely that, despite the huckleberry sale ban, lots still sneak through and end up feeding local economies. Large quantities of mass-produced items like jams and syrups are more likely to be artificially flavored. Artificial flavoring is a tricky thing to talk about in the U.S. Technically, you can create something with “natural flavors” that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re eating what you think you’re eating.

A great example of this is castoreum, a natural flavoring that is used to give raspberry flavor to various things like syrup or yogurt. It’s a natural flavor in the sense that it comes from a natural source — the anal glands of beavers — but it doesn’t end up in the food naturally, it’s artificially collected and placed there.

Many flavors are artificially synthesized from raw chemicals that are slapped together to simulate the flavor profiles of natural sources. Vanilla can be artificially synthesized, though castoreum is often used instead of chemicals. Despite some digging, I couldn’t discover the chemical origins of synthetic huckleberry flavoring. Much like 3-D printing resin, manufacturers keep chemical compositions close to the vest as trade secrets.

I guess if we want natural flavors, we’ll just have to keep munching on beaver butts.

Stay curious, 7B.