Bilberries on the ridge, cranberries out on the bog

The two berry harvests here are three months and four kilometres apart, and they share almost nothing beyond the word picking. One is a hot afternoon on a dry ridge; the other is an October morning spent balancing on moss that floats.

Collected: 6 October 2024
Written up: 19 January 2025
Locality: Varėna, Alytus County
Season: October 2024
Reading: 7 minutes
Parts: 4

July on the dry ridge

Mėlynės grow where the pines are oldest and the sand is driest, along the low ridge that runs parallel to the river about a kilometre back from the water. The bushes there are ankle-high and entirely unremarkable for eleven months of the year. By the middle of July the good slopes look almost blue from standing height, and picking becomes a matter of squatting in one spot for twenty minutes, shuffling two metres, and squatting again. It is hot work in a pine forest with no wind, and it is the only harvest the whole household will turn out for.

Everybody argues about the scoop. The comb-shaped picker takes four times as many berries in an hour and brings leaves, twigs and unripe fruit along with them, and the bushes look chewed afterwards. By hand is slow and clean, and your fingers can feel which berries are ready to come away. My compromise is unheroic: hands for the first bucket, which is the one we freeze whole, and the scoop for the second, which is going into jars and will be picked over on the kitchen table anyway while somebody complains about it.

The bog in October

Spanguolės are a different country. The bog is twenty minutes further out and begins as ordinary wet birch scrub, then the trees give up and the ground turns to sphagnum, which is not ground at all but a mat of living moss floating on water of unknown depth. Walking on it feels like walking on a mattress laid over a swimming pool. The cranberries lie on top of the moss, scattered singly rather than in clusters, and in a good October there are enough of them that you pick sitting down and simply reach.

The place deserves more respect than a pine ridge does. I do not go alone, I keep the edge of the open water in sight, and I test the way ahead with a stick long enough to look ridiculous carrying. The dangerous spots are not the obvious pools but the smooth green stretches between them, where moss has grown over the water and looks like somebody's lawn. Twice I have gone in to the waist. Both times were within the same fifty metres, which says rather less about the bog than it does about me.

Field marks

Never alone, and tell somebody at home which bog
A stick longer than your arm, tested ahead of every step
Keep open water in sight; the smooth green stretches are thin
Dry clothes waiting in the car, not in the bag on your back

Lingonberries and the argument about frost

Bruknės sit between the two, on the dry edges where the ridge begins sloping towards wet ground, and they ripen from the end of August onwards. The old rule is to wait for the first frost, which takes the bitterness out of them. What the first frost also does is turn them soft, and a soft lingonberry travels home as juice in the bottom of the bucket. I pick before the frost now and let the berries stand a week in a cold shed, which does most of the same work and leaves them firm enough to sort by hand.

They keep almost indefinitely in plain water, which is the trick I was slowest to believe. Clean berries in a jar, covered with cold boiled water, no sugar at all, kept somewhere cool: by February the water tastes of them and the berries are still whole. We use them the way other households use a condiment, a spoonful beside anything roasted, and the jar opened in March is nearly always better than anything that was cooked with sugar back in September.

Getting berries home in one piece

The journey does more damage than the picking ever does. Bilberries in a deep bucket crush themselves under their own weight in the time it takes to walk out, and what arrives at the kitchen is a purple sludge with skins in it. Shallow and wide beats deep and tall for everything except cranberries, which are tough enough not to care either way. I carry a flat basket for the ridge, a lidded bucket for the bog, and a folded cloth to lay over the top so that the forest road does not finish the job.

Cleaning is a wind job. Tipping a bucket slowly from one basin into another in an open doorway on a breezy day carries the leaves and the light debris away and leaves the berries behind, and it is the only part of this that has ever looked skilful. Water is a last resort for bilberries, which drink it and go dull. Cranberries can be washed and spread on a towel, and anything soft is set aside at that point rather than argued with for another ten minutes.

Field marks

Shallow and wide for bilberries; depth crushes them on the walk
A cloth over the top stops the forest road doing the rest
Clean in a doorway with a breeze before you reach for a tap
Sort the soft ones out that same evening, not next morning