Photo: Stan Shebs — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 4 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
A tough, drought-adapted mounding shrub of the dry interior West; fruit used for jam, jelly, pie and historically pemmican.
- Hardiness
- Zone 4–8
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- June–Aug
- Mature size
- Bush 1–1.5 m; excellent in containers
- Light
- Full sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Dry montane
- Native range
- Central/eastern British Columbia south to the Sierra Nevada, northern Arizona and northern New Mexico.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 1–2 yrs
- Growth speed
- Slow.
- Spacing
- 107 cm (42 in) apart — about 1.1 m² (12 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Small, rounded, gray-green leaves 1.5–2.5 cm long, shallowly divided into 3–5 toothed lobes, dotted with resin glands.
- Root system
- Not rhizomatous; weak sprouting from the root crown, spreading mainly by seed rather than vegetatively.
- Fruit description
- Fuzzy, glandular-hairy red berries about 1–1.2 cm wide; flavor is largely bland by most accounts, and can cause mild nausea if eaten in quantity.
- Propagation
- Mainly by seed, which needs scarification to germinate; forms a persistent soil seed bank.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Companion planting. Rated the lowest blister rust risk category in USFS hazard studies ("usually insignificant") — one of the safer currants near white pines. It is, however, a common host for a different fungus, pinyon leaf rust (Coleosporium ribicola), in the Southwest — don't confuse the two.
Grow journal
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