#silverberry

old art can be peak or strange sometimes

(ZERO, CANDLE X LIGHTBULB + SILVERBERRY MENTIONED)

cuz why did I draw blihberry getting high im gonna cry

hehehehehawhaw 🎈🪙 !!!

silverberry!! 🫐🥄 <3

Knifecase woah 🔪🧳!!!

SO. If you live in some of the like, 67% of the US flooded with invasive autumn olive/silverberry or whatever, may I highly recommend you eat it?? I don’t know that it’s likely to make any kind of dent in the population but it is absolutely delicious in jams and makes banger fuckin fruit leather with zero pectin and much less sugar than it would take with most other fruits, all while tasting like a pretty killer cherry/cranberry/strawberry hybrid. I threw it in with some plums and cooked down with 50% by volume sugar added to the blended and strained ‘juice’ (it gels so hard with just olives or with the plums) and you can practically cut gummies out of it.

I used this recipe, and really scraped and squashed the blended cooked pulp through the strainer to get as much solids as possible in there. The leather is plenty firm, but I’m dehydrating it a few hours in the oven on low to make it a bit less sticky!

Shrub, Non-Native, Fall Forage

Family: Elaegnaceae

Habitat: Thickets and thin woods in hills and lowlands

Autumn olive was brought to the United States from Japan in the 1800s and thrives here, making it invasive. Birds love the berries and help to disperse the seeds, which can grow in many soil conditions and climates. Autumn olive also has nitrogen fixing abilities allowing it to do well even in poor soil. Since it’s an invasive, widespread plant don’t worry about harvesting too much! It actually has the potential to be one of the most troublesome shrubs in the central and eastern U.S. There will be plenty left for birds and other wildlife, especially since just one plant can grow 80+ pounds of fruit!

Identification

Autumn olive is a deciduous shrub/small tree that can grow up to 14ft(4.5m) in height. It has fragrant white flowers that bloom in spring, May and June with a warm spice-like scent.

The berries ripen in fall, usually September to November depending on your location. They will appear ripe long before they actually are. Ripe berries are tart and sweet, unripe berries are astringent.

The foliage resembles a true olive, but the fruit is red and sweet. The undersides of the leaves are silver and the ripened berries are flecked with silver. The berries are about 8mm in diameter and contain a single large seed.

Harvest

The stems of the plant have thorns, so take caution when harvesting. You can run gloved hands up and down the stems or place a tarp beneath the shrub and shake the berries off.

Edible Uses

The berries can be eaten raw or cooked. They are juicy and pleasantly tart. They are excellent turned into jams, preserves, etc. Silverberries are high in vitamin C and lycopene, about 12mg of vitamin C per 100g of fruit. The seeds are safe to eat, but the seed case is hard and fibrous so you may want to spit them out.

I don’t recommend using the entire berry in recipes because of those hard seeds, remove them or just use the pulp/juice. Autumn olives taste amazingggg in muffins, breads, pancakes, jellies, jams, chutneys, even ketchup!

Medicinal Uses

birdpaw, honeypaw, and sandypaw are apprenticed to mintfur, thriftbloom, and nettlesplash.

cherrytail has five kits, balsamkit (small, mottled brown and white tom with teal eyes), hurricanekit (intimidating she-cat with pale brown patches and teal eyes), mistkit, needlekit (pale brown tom with faint stripes, white paws, and teal eyes), and silverkit (white she-cat).