GARDEN HUCKLEBERRIES ... THE FIRST SEASON FRUIT

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Plant this speedy garden fruit after frost & you'll blessed with a bountiful crop of pie-perfect berries in a more 80 days!

by Nancy Pierson Farris

When my family and I finally obtained our South Carolina homestead, we-like many newly landed folksIssue no. 80 - March/April 1983were eager to get some fruit trees planted. However, price those young hardwoods were in the ground (and looking disappointingly small and vulnerable), we were forced to face the fact that it would be years before they yielded a sizable crop. So in an effort to hurry our production of homegrown pie makings, I set out in search of fast-bearing alternatives ... and discovered the garden huckleberry.

Interestingly enough, Solanum melanocerasum is one of the nightshades. It seems that this little fruit, which grows on rangy 2-1/2-foottall (or larger) plants, requires the same horticultural techniques as does its tomato relatives ... which the garden huckleberry resembles in both foliage and growth characteristics. Needless to say, the opportunity to harvest homegrown berries in one season appealed to me ... so I dutifully sent off for some seeds (see the accompanying access list for the names of firms carrying S. melanocerasum seeds).

I timed the starting date for my huckleberries to coincide 'with that for our tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers (all members of the nightshade family) and sowed the berry seeds in flats, spacing them about two inches apart. Once the resulting seedlings formed second leaves, I moved them into peat pots . . . and, during the course of the plants' "infancy", I made sure that each little berry-bearer received five hours of grow-light exposure and four hours on a south-facing windowsill daily. (I also treated the seedlings to regular doses of the same liquid fertilizer that I fed to my "baby" tomatoes.)

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