Photo: Walter Siegmund (talk) — 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.
Dark purple-black fruit, tart and very juicy, described as having an "agreeable flavour when fully ripe" — but the crushed foliage and fruit have a distinctly skunky smell, and the densely bristly, prickly stems make this more of a wildlife thicket plant than a garden fruit crop.
- Hardiness
- Zone 4–8
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- June–Aug
- Mature size
- Bristly deciduous shrub 0.5–2 m
- Light
- Partial to full sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Montane and boreal
- Native range
- Throughout Canada and much of the western and northern US, coast to subalpine, with a disjunct population in western New England.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 1–2 yrs
- Growth speed
- Moderate.
- Spacing
- 150 cm (59 in) apart — about 2.3 m² (24 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Palmately 3–5-lobed, roughly round, 2.5–4 cm, serrated margins — resembling a small maple leaf.
- Root system
- Very shallow, especially on moist sites, with extensive lateral spread; can root wherever stems touch soil.
- Fruit description
- Small (5–10 mm), dark purple berries covered in weak gland-tipped bristles; tart and juicy with an agreeable flavor once fully ripe, though the crushed fruit smells foul (fading once eaten in quantity).
- Propagation
- Seed, sown fresh in autumn or cold-stratified 4-6 months at around freezing.
- Pollination
- Hermaphrodite flowers, insect-pollinated. No self-compatibility study for this species specifically: cultivated currants and gooseberries are largely self-fruitful, but controlled work on wild western Ribes found several species outright self-sterile, so a single plant is not a safe assumption. Plant two.
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
Growing tips. Shade-tolerant (fruits less in shade than in sun); densely bristled, spiny stems — erect in sun, sprawling/trailing in shade.
Companion planting. A confirmed blister rust host, though its relative severity as a vector isn't specifically ranked in the hazard-rating literature checked — site away from white pines as a precaution.
Grow journal
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