I don’t usually reblog posts (my own or otherwise) on Flowery Prose, but sea buckthorn are now ready to harvest here in western Canada and I thought it might be appropriate to share a recipe in which to use them! Have you ever eaten sea buckthorn berries?
(Photo credit: R. Normandeau)
My hubby and I managed to get out this past Saturday morning and gather some sea buckthorn fruit so that I could try my hand at making jelly from it. If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’ll recall that I made a sea buckthorn beverage last year – I just love the citrusy taste of the berries and their gorgeous sun-bright colour.
Sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) is a fairly common roadside plant here in Calgary – the City planted many of them years ago, mostly for erosion control on slopes. It’s one of those shrubs you’d be hard-pressed to kill: it’s tough-as-nails, drought-tolerant, pollution and salt-tolerant (good for our winter roads and all that de-icing salt), and a fairly aggressive spreader. You don’t find it employed as an ornamental landscape plant very often, but it’s really very pretty, with silvery-green leaf clusters and the brilliant autumn fruit. (Both male and female…
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I’ve just realised this is what we call Sanddorn here – I have heard how healthy the berries are, packed with vitamin C! They don’t grow wild here, and since we don’t have a bush I have never tried them. I assume they are sour and can only be eaten cooked, like elderberries?
They seem to be much more palatable than elderberries – they are just a tiny bit sour, like eating certain varieties of oranges. You can eat them out of hand; they’re incredibly juicy. But they have a strange consistency, very oily, so they’re a bit odd on the tongue.
I wanted to write that I had never heard of buckthorn, and 5hen I read the other comment. Sandorn. We used to drink juice of it as children as they are so healthy. Your jelly looks super. I bet it tastes fantastic.
The berries are definitely full of all kinds of healthy vitamins and antioxidants! They taste like pure sunshine! 🙂
I had not heard of this before… Michelle
It’s a beautiful, rugged shrub that likes arid conditions…it grows like mad here. I’ve never seen them naturalized in the wild, though, which is probably a good thing (they’re quite aggressive)…I’ve only seen plants in the city.