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2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47
An unusual and useful Sakhalin red berry begins its movement to the western regions of the country
Redberry or vaccinium excellent (Vaccinium praestans) is a wild berry ground cover deciduous shrub from the cowberry family. This plant is unknown to most of the population of Russia, because it grows en masse only on Sakhalin, and even in much smaller quantities - on the Kuril Islands, Kamchatka and Primorye. Abroad, redberry is found only on some islands in Japan.
The height of the shrub is 8–10 cm, but its leaves are large, about the size of a birch leaf. An interesting feature of them is the color changing over the season. At the beginning of May, they are light salad green, then turn dark green with a beautiful crimson appearance. In June, when the redberry is covered with graceful white-pink flowers, the leaves turn dark green. In late July - early August, pink berries begin to appear, by the end of August they ripen, turn red, resembling cranberries in color and round shape. And together with the scarlet color of the berries, the foliage turns red. At this time, she is most beautiful.
The average size of berries in natural conditions largely depends on the place of growth and the weather. The largest berries are found in wetlands with sphagnum, and even under the canopy of plants. But on open slopes, which means dryish and well-lit, they are smaller. The most large-fruited forms are found in the central part of Sakhalin - the diameter of berries is 1.4 cm, the average weight of a berry is 1 g. The number of berries per bush reaches 10-15 pieces. The potential for productivity of redberry is evidenced by the fact that in the wild on Sakhalin in 1981, the most productive year for it, a crop of 2166 kg / ha was recorded, the number of fruits was 520 pcs / m2, their weight was 433 g / m2? … But even a simple mechanical (but, of course, competent) transfer of wild-growing plants to the garden and caring for them already increases the yield by 2–3 times.
Red berries have an amazing property, as it were, to hide among the leaves. Redberry pickers sometimes even have to lie down on the ground, pushing the foliage apart, and look for berries carefully, looking up the plants. And closer to autumn, when the leaves fall, the berries open, and in the places where the redwoods grow, the hills become literally red from them.
In taste and aroma, red berries are more than original: they combine sour, sweet, bitter and salty, and for a persistent aroma reminiscent of certain insects, the people christened this plant a bug. You can't eat its berries just like, for example, lingonberries, cranberries. Sakhalin residents say about them that they are "none". And, nevertheless, from year to year thousands of collectors go after them to distant and near hills. There is information that, for example, in 1984 more than 50 thousand people visited only one Krasnichnaya massif (the village of Pugachevo). At the end of the eighties of the last century, the population annually collected up to 300 tons of these seemingly "no" berries for their own needs. But besides the red berries, other berries grow in the wild on the same Sakhalin.
Such interest in redberry is explained by the value of the biochemical composition of its berries, which makes them medicinal, and the ease of preparation of various products from it, which, unlike berries, are attractive in taste and, moreover, are still curative. Redberry berries are rich in flavonoids and other P-active substances, which makes them effective in reducing blood pressure in hypertension. They are also rich in ascorbic acid - 80-100 mg /%, which means that half a handful of berries or something about a glass of diluted syrup is enough to meet the daily requirement for vitamin C. There are tannins and trace elements in the berries. Reds are especially valuable because they contain benzoic acid, which makes them a powerful preservative.
Sakhalin resident Yuri Akhatov told me that the local population pours red berries into large glass bottles or enameled containers and adds sugar there - for 1 liter of berries 2 liters of sugar. After about a month, the berries give off juice and float. Then the juice with the remaining sugar is mixed and drained. Such juice, or rather - cold, without boiling, cooking, syrup is a brightly colored, somewhat jelly-like mass. The taste is very peculiar, it cannot be compared with anything, I liked it. I speak firsthand, I tried it myself. A bottle of such a homemade product, and even with a computer-made sticker "Klopovka" was brought to me by a representative of Sakhalin gardeners, Yuri Akhatov. True, it is generally accepted that products made from redberries "give off bedbugs," but I would say that this is more aftertaste, moreover, not sharp, but more piquant.giving the product a unique originality.
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