Blue Honeysuckle (Lonicera caerulea) Featured as an unusual new berry crop, and sold as "Honeyberry" in many garden catalogs lately, Blue Honeysuckle (Lonicera caerulea) hails from the Russian far east (where it is known as jumula) and northen Japan where it is apparently a common forest understory plant and much appreciated as a wild-picked berry. There isn't a lot of information online about its edible qualities however, so I thought I would add my own comments. Having planted a number of cultivars some years ago, I found the plant easy to grow here in zone five (interior Pacific Northwest). It does suffer a bit in mid-summer heat here in one of the hotter regions of the state, and seems to perfer moist soil and partial shade at those times. Though only of mediocre quality as a berry eaten fresh off the bush, tasting something akin to a slightly sour inferior blueberry with a slight aftertaste (some might rate them comparable to Oregon grape but sweeter and juicier), the species nonetheless has some redeeming and valuable qualities. Sweetened and cooked as a jam, jelly, syrup, juice, or pie-filling, these berries are quite flavorful, and I would rate them as good to very good, rather than the poor to mediocre rating that I have given them as a freshly eaten berry. My Blue-belle cultivar provided a small initial harvest today and I cooked a sample up for testing. Of the various cultivars I have so far tried, this Blue Belle cultivar seems to bear the heaviest, and by no small margin. It ripens by early June. Other plants have not attained full size and optimal bearing age yet though. The berries crop consistently on the small bush (about 4' high), and the juicy blue elongated berries typically measured about 5/8 inches long by 3/8 inches in diameter. One cup of berries combined with 1/4 cup water, and 5 tablespoons of sugar, and then simmered for about 12 minutes while stirring and mashing the berries yeilded a rich maroon-colored jam which I found to be highly flavored and fragrant, tasting something like a combination of blueberry and blackberry but with its own distinct flavors throughout. To a portion of this I added a bit of cornstarch, and ended up with what seemed like would serve as an excellant pie-filling material, though the above proportion of berries and sugar seems to have thickened fairly well on its own as a soft jam. This bush is extremely cold-hardy (rated to zone 2 in the catalogs). It has shown no sign of winter dieback here though its branches are quite brittle and break easily from snow and birds even. It is absolutely the first berry to bloom and bear fruit around here. I am picking June 6th this year, which is a couple weeks ahead of my strawberries. The elongated tubular twin-flowers seem very frost-hardy, and early in the spring are quite attractive to bumblebees and other long-tongued bees which can reach the nectar deep within them. I have grown these berry plants from seed. After a cold, moist, winter stratification, they sprout readily enough but losses to the tiny young plants were fairly high over time. The plants produce berries in two to three years, and seem fairly true-to-form with the parents. Clearly however, the way to propagate this plant is through layering of the branches in moist soil, or perhaps cuttings (which I have not experimented with). Branches buried last year with tips exposed are now rooting nicely. In coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest this plant probably grows most vigorously of all, though the early bloom and cool wet weather may cause pollination and yield problems. (There are later blooming cultivars being sold to remedy this though.) With its increasing familiarity and planting, I would expect bird-sown seeds to cause Blue Honeysuckle to naturalize readily within a few years of its introduction in America.

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