I remember growing up on Salt Spring Island in the 1980s when picking blackberries was a full-contact sport. As soon as August rolled around when the sun had baked the grass dry, and the lakes were like bathwater, I’d spy whole families (including my own) wading into the thick Himalayan and Allegheny blackberry brambles that lined our quiet dirt roads.
Armed with gumboots, tattered long-sleeved shirts and a stack of white ice cream buckets we’d been collecting all summer, we’d do battle for the promise of pies, jams, crumbles and post-pick feasting. Despite the threat of wasp stings, thorn scratches and stinging-nettle welts, the risk was always worth the sweet reward.
I’m not alone in my memories of blackberries and ice cream buckets in the Gulf Islands. Jonathan Frazier, chef and owner of Blue Spruce Ice Cream and host of the podcast The Edible Valley, used to do the same thing on Hornby Island.
“My first memories of picking berries are from when I was a kid…heading down to Tribune Bay to pick blackberries, filling ice cream buckets full.”
Now, as an adult, he takes care to steward the land he’s harvesting from: “I always follow the rules when picking wild berries. One for me, one for the bucket, and one for the wood, hoping that another bush will grow with more berries next year.”
Beyond four blackberry varieties, Vancouver Island and the other coastal islands have a long list of other edible berries (see sidebar) including salmonberries, salal berries, thimbleberries, strawberries and huckleberries, not to mention the recently introduced cultivated types that also thrive on the islands.
“There's something so beautiful about that diversity,” says Haidee Hart, resident chef at Stowel Lake Farm on Salt Spring Island and co-author of Seven Seasons on Stowel Lake Farm.
“From the extreme wild berries, where you almost don't even see them — but they're there, and they've been here for thousands of years, and the First Nations people survived on them — then right through to what we can do domestically now.
Growing up between Haida Gwaii and Bamfield, Hart was used to rugged environments where cultivating plants didn’t always work out, so relying on wild berries built for this climate was essential. That foraging spirit is something she’s instilled in her own family to this day.
“We’ll try to go out to Port Renfrew and do a big huckleberry and salmonberry pick,” says Hart. “It brings me right back to when I grew up, where the bears would be out there picking berries [alongside us]—I mean, it was just so wild and awesome!”
Hart used to eat her mother’s huckleberry pies up in Haida Gwaii and her grandmother’s garden-grown strawberries with cream and a spoonful of white sugar in Bamfield, but these days on Salt Spring Island she’s creating her own culinary memories.
“Salal berries are super coastal and wild—they’re just beautiful to cook with, and to make sauces for more savory applications like lamb or chicken,” says Hart. But her favourite is still those big, juicy Himalayan blackberries.
“When the Sockeye and Coho are running, and you get those first blackberries, you can make a fresh blackberry sauce or bake them right in with the fish—I just think that’s the ultimate West Coast culinary experience.”
Knowing what magic can come from these humble island berries each summer, maybe it’s time for me to dust off my ice-cream buckets again.
May-June salmonberry
Late June oval-leaved blueberry, saskatoon berry
July-August salal berry, wild red raspberry, trailing raspberry, Western black raspberry, thimbleberry, dwarf bramble
July-September native trailing blackberry
August bog blueberry, red huckleberry, Himalayan and Allegheny blackberry
August-September black huckleberry, dwarf blueberry, Oregon grape and cutleaf blackberry
Into winter evergreen huckleberry
Picking tips:
Harvest the edges of berry patches—leave the inner and higher berries for birds and wild creatures.
Don’t eat what you don’t know.
Watch your feet—berry thickets can cover up a sudden hole or cliff.
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