How To Quickly And Easily Collect Sea Buckthorn?

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Sea buckthorn is a very bright, juicy, tasty and incredibly healthy berry: even the wise ancient Greeks regaled their athletes and warriors with it to give them strength, and the hair and mane of horses grazing near the sea buckthorn bushes invariably acquired an amazing shine! And in our modern age, sea buckthorn also does not lose its relevance and popularity - it is widely used both in cooking, and in cosmetology, and in medicine. But when collecting precious berries, there is a great risk of getting seriously injured! Is it possible to collect wonderful berries without harming your health, so that valuable fruits still do not stay overwintering on the bushes after a string of unsuccessful attempts to reach them? As practice shows, everything is possible, especially if you thoroughly study the basic subtleties of harvesting sea buckthorn

When do they start picking berries?

Harvesting sea buckthorn berries usually begins immediately after the first frost hits. If you take time, they will become too soft and begin to crush right in your hands as they are ripped off. By the way, the ripeness of the berries and their readiness for picking is not so difficult to determine - ripe sea buckthorn fruits always adhere tightly to each other on the branches and boast a rich bright orange color.

Before starting to harvest a valuable crop, it is important to answer the question for what purposes it will be harvested. If the berries are used for jam or compote, as well as if they are going to “just eat”, then it is best to start picking them at the very beginning of the ripening period. And those who plan to get butter from the berries or make delicious marmalade will have to wait until the sea buckthorn absorbs more moisture and becomes much juicier (usually the berries meet these characteristics by mid-autumn).

Basic Rules

In most cases, sea buckthorn fruits begin to be plucked from the upper branches, slowly moving towards the lower ones. Going to the garden, it is best to put on old clothes - then it will not be so a pity to stain it with the juice of bursting berries (and there will certainly be such!), And in order to protect your hands from insidious thorns, it will not hurt to put gloves on them. It is also important not to forget that the juice flowing from the bursting berries is very rich in acids and has the ability to irritate the skin quite strongly, therefore hands, eyes and face should be protected from its possible ingress without fail!

The easiest way to pick the berries is to spread them under the bushes on a piece of dense cloth or cellophane and start hitting the trunk and branches of the bushes with a stick. The berries will begin to fall onto the spread material, from which it will be very convenient to pour them into prepared containers (wooden boxes, containers, etc.). The only drawback of this method of picking berries is a fairly decent amount of damaged fruits. If you want to pick berries without any damage, you will have to do it manually. This work is very painstaking and laborious - first, each berry is carefully separated by hands from the branches and stalks, after which it is lowered into a previously prepared container. And to speed up the harvesting process and make it even more convenient, it is recommended to hang the container around your neck. When you develop a certain skill, things will go much faster!

Special devices

Experienced summer residents have long ago simplified the process of collecting sea buckthorn by preparing special devices for this purpose, like a loop, a scraper, scissors and a tin tube. The loop, or, as it is also called, "cobra", will not be difficult to build on your own. To do this, you need to arm yourself with a thin steel wire and a small wooden block that will act as a handle. First, a loop is made of wire, outwardly resembling the head of a cobra with a slightly open hood, and then using an awl, this loop is attached to a wooden handle. Such a simple device allows you to quickly and easily pick juicy berries even in the most inaccessible places! In order not to prick your hands, you can simply fasten such a loop to the edge of the branch, and then remove all the fruits from it with a sharp movement. Only in this case, it is important not to forget to substitute wide containers under the berry bushes, into which the berries will fall.

As for the scraper, it is usually made of aluminum wire half a meter long. In the very center of a piece of this wire, a small curl should be bent (like a spring - such a curl can be made by wrapping the wire around the neck of the most ordinary glass bottle). Further, the tips of the device are aligned and bent to one side at an angle of ninety degrees. With such a scraper, twigs with berries are subsequently clamped and, moving it downward, they pluck mouth-watering fruits. It should be understood that when using this method of picking berries, some of them will certainly be crushed.

A tin tube is constructed from a tin plate ten centimeters long, while the diameter of the finished device must exceed the dimensions of the berries. One of the edges of such a tube is attached to an ordinary plastic bag, and the other edge of the device is brought to the berries and slightly pressed on the stalks - the berries will immediately separate from the branches and fall into the bag.

If you don’t want to, or you’re just too lazy to build this kind of "gadgets", you can use a blade, well-sharpened scissors or a special mitten (it is especially good to use them to remove berries from branches cut from bushes). In this case, shrubs equipped with dense thorny twigs will also not seem too scary and inaccessible!