Tim Corcoran identifies serviceberry, a native shrub with white spring flowers and blue-purple berries that ripen in late June. Indigenous peoples relied on it as a staple food, and you can eat the berries fresh or make them into leather and jelly. The dense wood was traditionally used for tool handles.
All right, so next up we've got serviceberry. This one's also known as Saskatoon. And this is a native species native to North America. And this species has been growing here in the US for tens of thousands of years. This is a shrub. What identifies it as a shrub is that multiple trunks coming from one common area. And then if you take a good close look at the leaves, we can see right here. The leaves are oval shaped and the top half has teeth, bottom half not so much, and they're coming out alternate one another. So one on the right, a little tough to see there, but one on the right, one on the left, one on the right, one on the left.
Here are the berries. It's early October here in Spokane. And so these berries have dried.
But in the springtime, this would have been white flowers with five parts in the rose family. And then, of course, turning to the blue purple berries. Now, these berries are amazing. And this was a staple food, a traditional heritage species for all the native people that lived in the areas where this shrub grows and these berries grow and these shrubs grow in abundance. The berries can be eaten straight. They're a little mealy when they're, when they're at their peak ripeness, which is going to be like right around the summer solstice here in Spokane, you know, June 21st through the 4th of July. That's when I'm definitely harvesting all my service berries.
Now you can do a few different things with them. You can eat them straight. There's a fun thing. Kids love this to make fruit leather. What you do is you take a whole bunch of them and mash them up and then paste them out like in a dehydrator or in the oven at a really low setting and let that dry and it makes a really nice fruit leather.
Another thing you can do is make a serviceberry jelly. Some people don't like serviceberry because it's a little bit mealy and there's kind of a lot of seeds in there. That said, you can take a bunch of them just like with the Oregon grape, squish them down, push that through a cheesecloth and get just the pure juices. That will make an amazing base for a jelly. And serviceberry jelly is one of my favorites, for sure. Traditionally, this would have been used in a lot of different ways. The serviceberries are mixed with lots of different in lots of different dishes and to be used traditionally. The wood here service berry grows really slow, and so the wood is really dense, so it makes great tool handles.
Ben here likes to do the Spartan spear throwing. You know, a traditional spear here in the inland northwest might have been made from a.
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