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Common lingonberry is a forest or marsh berry with sweet and sour vitamin berries. It grows in swamps and forests, where it can be collected from bushes and brought home. It is also grown on industrial sites for fresh consumption or for further processing.
Lingonberry: plant description
Lingonberries (lat. species name Vaccínium vítis-idaéa) belong to the Heather family. According to her detailed description, it is easy to imagine how she should look and find her in nature:
- It is a shrub with persistent, always green leaves. They are leathery, arranged alternately, frequent. Their upper surface is dark green, glossy, the lower surface is matte and light green. The shape of lingonberry leaves is obovate or elliptical, their edges are slightly bent down. Leaf blades are small, from 0,5 to 3 cm long, up to 1,5 cm wide, sitting on short petioles.
- The rhizome of this plant is creeping, horizontally located, a fungus lives on its surface, which absorbs minerals from the soil and transfers them to the plant.
- Underground shoots with sleeping buds depart from the rhizome.
- Above-ground shoots are branched, ascending, short, only 10–20 cm tall. However, if the lingonberry shoots are forced to overcome some obstacle that has arisen in their way, then they can stretch much longer – up to 1 m.
- Her flowers are white or pale pink, bell-shaped, regular, bisexual, with an unexpressed smell, sitting on short pedicels. They are collected in drooping brushes of 10–20 pieces. together.
- After flowering, which takes about 2 weeks, round shiny berries appear in their place.
What a lingonberry plant looks like is shown in the photo.
Description of cranberries
They are small (up to 8 mm), red, with a dried flower calyx remaining at the top. The taste of cowberry berries is characteristic – sweet-sour, with bitterness. They ripen in late summer – early autumn, but after the onset of frost they soften and become watery. They still remain on their stalks and can even hang like that all winter, but fall off in the spring from any touch. In winter, birds feed on them and carry the seeds around, spreading the plant farther and farther.
What is lingonberry
Cowberry is a typical marsh and forest berry. It grows in nature completely freely, occupying areas of various sizes, from small clearings to large thickets. But cultural forms of this berry, which are grown on an industrial scale, have also been bred. There is also a garden lingonberry intended for planting and growing on garden beds in household plots. Cultivated varieties are maximally adapted to growing conditions in home beds, they have a higher yield than wild forms. The yield of berries with full coverage of the plantation is 3 centners per hectare or more.
How lingonberries grow
Lingonberries in nature, as a rule, grow in curtains. They consist only of lingonberries or it is interspersed with mosses, other berries – blueberries, blueberries, etc., grass. In such thickets it is not easy to isolate any one plant, the roots and shoots of many specimens are intertwined and form a continuous carpet. Although the life expectancy of each individual wild lingonberry plant is relatively short – only 10-15 years, however, the entire plantation, which is formed by growing, many specimens, can live for more than a hundred years.
The lingonberry bush grows like this: the seeds germinate and by the end of the first season a 1–2 cm shoot with a wintering bud is formed from them. The main shoot grows out of it next spring, which dies off after 3 or 4 seasons, and lateral shoots grow in its place. Then shoots of the second order appear, and then underground shoots come to the surface. They form new bushes. How lingonberries grow in the forest can be seen in the photo.
When lingonberries ripen
Lingonberries ripen almost throughout the entire territory of their growth in August or September. It is at this time that you can go to the forest to collect it. The collection season can be extended until frost, that is, in some regions until November. After an autumn cold snap, the berries lose their bitterness, but become soft and, put in a basket, immediately release juice and flow. Therefore, the berries picked in November are only suitable for quick processing into juice or for home-made preparations – making jam, jam, as well as fresh canning with sugar.
When it is possible to collect forest lingonberries in Our Country depends on the region. In the northern regions, this can be done from the second half of September. In Siberia, the Middle lane, the Moscow region and the Urals, they ripen a little earlier – you can go for berries starting from the first days of September.
The ripening time is affected by the location of the plot with lingonberries – in open plots it sings earlier than in forest thickets located near. And also the weather in the current season affects this – if the summer turned out to be hot, then the berries will ripen earlier than in a cool and rainy one.
Cowberry harvest dates in 2019
In each region, the start time for harvesting lingonberries comes at different times, but, in general, there is no significant interval between the start of harvesting lingonberries in regions. End dates also vary. Usually, you can pick berries in the southern regions a few days earlier than those located to the north. The timing of the collection of lingonberries in 2019 can be found in the local news.
To go for lingonberries in the swamps or in the forest, you must first obtain permission from the local authorities. You can obtain the appropriate permit from the environmental department. Without it, citizens, both individuals and entrepreneurs, may be fined. The same applies to those who purchase assembled products.
Where does lingonberry grow in Our Country
You can find it in forests both overgrown with coniferous trees, and in mixed ones, in peat bogs, especially in dried ones, in shrub thickets, sometimes in flat and mountain tundra, alpine forests.
In Our Country, this berry plant is found in the Caucasus, Altai, the Urals, Karelia and the northern regions, Western Siberia, and the Far East. It can be found in Ukraine in the Carpathians and in Belarus in Polissya. In general, the habitat of lingonberries as a species covers North America, the countries of Central and Northern Europe, as well as Asia.
Where to pick lingonberries in the Leningrad region
There are berries almost throughout the region: in the Vyborgsky district, in the Luga region, near Priozersk. Cowberry places in the Leningrad region are near the villages of Slantsy, Sverdlovo, Vyritsa, in the forests near Zelenogorsk. You can get there by commuter train.
Where does lingonberry grow in the Moscow region
In this region, the berry grows mainly in sandy areas near rivers and near swamps. In the Moscow region, it is collected mainly in the coniferous forests of the Meshcherskaya lowland, namely in the Shatursky and Yegoryevsky districts.
Equipment for collecting lingonberries
Collecting small lingonberry berries with your hands is a long and tiring task. In order to quickly collect them and not damage them, you can use a special device – a manual combine. For the same purpose, scoops and rakes are used.
What is the best way to collect lingonberries: with a combine or by hand
Definitely, hand picking for the lingonberry itself is the most gentle. If you pick the berries one at a time, then the bush causes minimal damage: the leaves and twigs remain intact, the root system of the plants does not suffer. When harvested with a combine, the plant is injured one way or another, but if used correctly, the harm will be negligible. Among the shortcomings, it can be noted that, in addition to berries, blades of grass, leaves, twigs of other plants fall into the combine and after collection they have to be sorted out. This does not happen with manual collection.
However, the harvester significantly speeds up this process, so everyone has to make their own choice of how best to harvest lingonberries – manually or with the help of various devices.
Cowberry harvester
How to get this device? You can buy it, as various variations of this device are available at retail. Combines are manufactured by different companies, so they have slight differences in size, shape and design. They are made of steel, wood or plastic. These are simple devices that include a body, a handle and a comb, with which the berries are hooked and torn off the twigs. After that, they end up in a volumetric receiver (body), from where, when it is full, they are poured into a basket. To prevent the berries from spilling back, there is a partition in the design of the lingonberry harvester, which can be adjusted if necessary.
It is quite possible to make a lingonberry harvester with your own hands, since there is nothing complicated in its design and manufacture. The main thing to remember when making it is that there should be a distance of at least 5-6 mm between its teeth so that the berries can pass between them, and also that they should be rounded, not pointed and not too thin so as not to spring. The length of such teeth is about 10-20 cm, sufficient to be able to grab the entire lingonberry bush and cut it off with just one smooth movement.
You can make a harvester according to simple drawings that are on the Internet. The material of manufacture can be anything, it can be wood or thin metal, for example, sheet steel. And you will also need screws or self-tapping screws to connect individual parts and tools that will need to cut them into patterns. The harvester can still be used to collect other wild berries – cranberries, blueberries, blueberries and cloudberries.
How to quickly harvest lingonberries with a combine
Using a lingonberry harvester is extremely simple – just pry the berries with them like a scoop and pull it up. At the same time, branches with leaves freely, without breaking off, pass through the teeth, and the berries remain and roll into the “scoop”.
It is necessary to act smoothly, and not jerkily. When the capacity of the device is full, pour the crop into a basket or bucket. It takes relatively little time to fill the entire harvester, since manual harvesting would require much more. You need to try not to step on the bushes and move as carefully as possible. This will keep the lingonberry bushes intact and intact. Next year at this place it will be possible to collect many tasty and healthy berries again.
How to properly harvest lingonberries with a combine is shown in the video.
Rake for cranberries
This device is similar to the usual rake familiar to everyone. They also have teeth, but they are rounded, spaced 5 mm apart. Behind them is a wide container into which plucked berries fall. The rake has a rather high handle, so it is convenient to use them. Due to the fact that the rake has a wider receiving capacity, with the help of them you can collect more berries at a time than with a combine.
How to quickly pick lingonberries
If there is no harvester or rake, you can make the simplest such device from a plastic bottle and a wooden handle. To do this, you need a plastic bottle from mineral water, for example, or juices. But it is better to choose bottles made of durable rather than soft plastic – they will last longer. You need a bottle with a wide neck so that a wooden handle can fit into it. You will also need a sharp knife, which will need to cut a hole in the bottle and a rope or cord to tie the handle to the bottle.
How to make such a small home-made “combine”? Everything is very simple. You must first cut a round or square hole on one side of the bottle and give it the shape of teeth from one edge. The plastic is quite hard, so such teeth will be able to tear off the berries from the branches without any problems, they will not bend. Harvesting lingonberries with the help of such a device is carried out in the same way as with industrial-made combines.
Do lingonberries ripen after picking
It is believed that this berry, even picked not quite ripe, can ripen. Therefore, if you come to the forest, and lingonberry bushes are strewn with unripe berries, then you should not go back. You can collect, bring home and lay it out in a warm place.
How to ripen lingonberries at home
To stimulate ripening, you can use this method: put vegetables or fruits next to lingonberries, for example, ripe autumn apples. They release ethylene, a gas that causes the berry to turn red. Those who have tried this method claim that lingonberries ripened in this way do not differ from those ripened on the bushes.
Conclusion
Common lingonberry is a wild berry with a wonderful taste and very healthy. It is very easy to collect in nature or grow on the site. When it comes time to collect, you can use various devices that simplify the work – combine harvesters, shovels, rakes. Or just pick berries with your hands.