Autumnberry: A delicious fruit you may have never heard about

All the right elements seemed to combine this year to make it a bumper crop year around me for autumnberries. (These are sometimes also known as autumn-olive, with the scientific name of Elaeagnus umbellata.) It’s probably not a fruit you’re going to see in grocery stores. In fact, you may have never heard of it before, despite the fact that it’s said to be the most common wild fruit across large regions of North America. I only learned about it a few years ago and went hunting to try and find a bush. Eventually I found some along an old railroad line converted into a hiking/biking trail where I find a lot of wild foods. After positively identifying it in the field I was chagrined to discover a hearty sized specimen growing at the end of my driveway! Doh! It was growing right under my nose for years, with me walking by it everyday as I went to check the mail. I find this is so often how it is with wild edible foods. Until we become educated about them they remain a seemingly invisible part of the landscape. Put another way, the more I learn about wild edibles the more vibrant the natural world around me becomes!

(Please note some of the links in this blog post are affiliate links. What this means is that should you click through them and make a qualifying purchase I will receive a commission which I’d certainly appreciate since it helps support this blog project. However, this shouldn’t increase your cost any, and certainly don’t ever feel like I’m pressuring you to buy things through the links I offer or anywhere else. I’m all about being frugal first!)

So that was my initial paragraph for this post begun back during the harvest season for autumnberries. Sadly life got in the way of me returning to finish this in a timely fashion. So while I get to sit here enjoying the literal fruits of my labor in the form of preserved autumnberry fruit leather, I will share with you what you missed out on so next year you can be ready.

It was Samuel Thayer’s excellent second book, “Nature’s Garden” that first introduced me to Elaeagnus umbellata, and of course I will highly recommend the book to you as well, along with his other two books. In it he has all the particulars for positively identifying the plant. I don’t personally feel comfortable with my botany knowledge to cover all the stuff one would want to know for identification of wild things you plan to eat. Hence I’m going to recommend you find a good book such as this to guide you.

That said I will share some images of autumnberry bushes growing around me to help you start to notice them in your landscape should they grow there. During most of the year they really are quite unassuming. When seen from a distance I often find myself confusing it with some of the varieties of honeysuckle bushes that grow here too. The fruit doesn’t really develop until late in the summer, or really more like early fall. Even then it’s difficult to notice until it begins to ripen to the speckled red color.

A couple of things I’ve found distinctive to help me identify the bushes are that frequently they have several singular leaves scattered about the bush that are yellowing while the others are all a nice healthy green. I don’t know how universal this is. It might just be something that happens in my area due to poor soils or something. Speaking of which, one of the nice things about this plant is that it can grow in poor soils. In fact it was first introduced to help with erosion control and soil improvement. It is one of those plants that can fix nitrogen in the soil!

The other distinctive thing for me is that the underside of the leaves has a silvery look to it. I don’t know all my plants well enough to know if there are others with this look, hence why I’m strongly suggesting you find a good plant guide for positive identification.

One thing that is really distinctive is the fruit itself. When ripe autumnberries are small, not quite round berries that are red in color with silvery speckles on them. Inside is a single large, soft seed which can be eaten. I will admit though than when I’m eating them fresh I tend to toss a handful in my mouth, chew on them, and then eventually spit out the chewed up seeds. Another important thing to note, when they aren’t yet ripe these berries tend to be very astringent! When they are ripe there is a sweet tartness to them, with an undertone of astringent. At least that’s my impression of them.

As I noted at the beginning of this post, this year was a bumper crop. Most years around me the bushes are far more sparse with berries, making it a bit of a task to harvest any significant amount in a reasonable period of time. Mind you I’ve still been known to do it! There is something very pleasant about spending a warm autumn day outside along a trail harvesting fresh wild fruit. I do get strange looks from other passers by though. I’m guessing this is because most people have no idea what I’m harvesting, though the strange looks may just be because I’m a bit strange.

So as I was saying this year was a great year for the berries. I found many bushes just loaded with them, bending the branches down with the weight of great, nutritious food. When these conditions prevail it’s easy to harvest large amounts of berries quite quickly. I was able to gather a couple gallons in an hour or two.

Personally I find I’m not a huge fan of eating them in large quantities fresh out of hand, mainly due to the large seed in each one. What I have found to be an excellent way to process them for easier eating is a food mill, such as those commonly used for removing seeds and skins from tomatoes or grapes.

I’ve got a hand crank model I found used on EBAY several years ago. It works fantastic for rapidly processing large amounts of berries to remove the seeds and occasional stem bits. I just pour them in the feeder funnel and use a tamping stick to work them down into the auger screw as I turn the crank. This then churns them through squeezing the pulp and juice out through the screen, while dumping the seeds and such out the far end to be collected in another bowl.

As a tip for anyone else doing this, I’ve found that it’s well worth the time to run the discard pulp through the mill a second time. I swear I seem to get more pulpy goodness squeezed out on the second pass through than I do on the first! One other thing to note, with autumnberries a clearish liquid juice really likes to separate out from the rest of the pulp. If you wish you can pour this off and just drink it, but I feel like it leaves the rest short on flavor so I generally work to mix it back in.

From here it’s up to you what you’d like to do with the fruity pulp. I’ve mixed it in to a variation of my date “cookies” that I wrote about before with good success. I also frequently preserve it as fruit leather.

This year for my autumnberry fruit leather I tried something a bit different. In order to sweeten it up a bit more, mellowing the tartness of the fruit some, I blended in several ripe bananas to my mash. Then using the dehydrator tray inserts designed for doing things like fruit leather I just spread the mix out onto the trays, stacked them up, and let the dehydrator run for a couple days until the water had been evaporated.

Once it was dehydrated I just peeled the resulting leather off the trays and stored it away in a tin or ziplock bag to be enjoyed this winter while the bushes are buried under snow and ice.

Did I mention this is also a nutritious fruit. It’s said to contain about 18 times more lycopene than tomatoes! I imagine it contains all sorts of other good things for us as most fruit does. Autumnberry is a delicious, seasonal fruit you aren’t likely to find in stores, making it all the more of a rare luxury. It grows on perennial bushes that help to restore damaged soils and build up underground nitrogen content while also providing great habitats for birds and insects. Does it get any better than that? Well I suppose it is a bit better. I’ve also been using some of the pruned branches from the bush by my driveway as kindling to start the fires in my rocket mass heater this winter. So it’s a food, fuel, and soil building sort of plant for me!

I hope you’ll consider seeking out the autumnberry bush if it grows in your region next year. As I said in the beginning of this post, the more intimate our knowledge and relationships are with the plants growing around us the more vibrant and alive this planet that sustains us becomes in our daily lives.

Studio Snippet

For studio work right now I’m finishing up a batch of 16 pieces. I had wanted them to be done about a week ago so I could get them out to galleries that need to be restocked for the Christmas shopping season. As per usual I’m running behind, or rather my desired goals are always ahead of my abilities.

Anyway, I’ve finished polishing the silver rims on all these vessels. Tonight just before I go to bed I’ll paint on an adhesive sizing inside each of these in preparation for applying gold leaf tomorrow. I use a slow set sizing that takes 10 to 12 hours to set up to the proper working tack. That’s why I do it before bed. I can get up in the morning and putter around a bit, then when I’m ready to start work the sizing should be good to go. From there it will be hours of careful meticulous work laying the delicate sheets of gold leaf inside.

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.