Photo: Jonas Bergsten — Public domain · source
Survives zone 2 through 6
Harvest calendar
Ripens: Two crops: summer and autumn
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Lingonberry — sharply tart, classically served as a jam or sauce with Scandinavian meatballs, pork or game; its unusually high benzoic acid content gives it a long shelf life that made it a valued preserved fruit long before refrigeration.
- Hardiness
- Zone 2–6
- Habit
- Groundcover
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Two crops: summer and autumn
- Mature size
- Low evergreen mat 10–30 cm tall, creeping outward by rhizome; ideal in containers
- Light
- Full sun to partial; afternoon shade in heat
- Soil pH
- 4.3–5.5 in light, well-drained sand or silt loam with 2–6% organic matter — high soil calcium is toxic, as with blueberries
- Environment
- Arctic and boreal
- Native range
- Circumboreal — northern Europe (Scandinavia, the UK, Iceland, the Alps), Russia, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan and northeastern Turkey; in North America, Alaska, most of Canada, Greenland and northern New England, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- Full production in 4–5 yrs; some cultivars (e.g. "Splendor") can crop in year 2
- Growth speed
- Slow in the first year while the root system establishes; fruiting begins in 2–3 years, and rhizome spread typically fills in a planted bed within 4–5 years.
- Spacing
- 30 cm (12 in) apart — about 11 per m² (10 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Thick, leathery, evergreen leaves, obovate to oblong or elliptic, glossy dark green and turning purplish in autumn.
- Root system
- Fine, shallow, fibrous roots plus branching rhizomes 10–20 cm deep, forming dense mat-like colonies.
- Fruit description
- Bright to dark red, globular berries 6–10 mm across — smaller than a cranberry — with a tangy, sour flavor.
- Propagation
- Commercially by stem cuttings of the current year's growth taken in late summer, rooted under high humidity in a 1:1 peat:sand mix, or by tissue culture; a cranberry-style method of slicing off runners during bed narrowing and disc-incorporating them into the soil is also used.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile — isolated plants do set fruit — but a pollenizer cultivar (e.g. "Red Pearl" or "Sussi", at roughly 10% of a planting) markedly improves yield: trials found 58–64% fruit set with cross- or open-pollination versus 28% self-pollinated and 2% for fully isolated flowers. Pollinated by honeybees and bumblebees.
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
Fertilizing. 20–40 lb actual nitrogen per acre in years 1–6 (40 lb/acre from year 6 on), in ammonium form — urea or ammonium sulfate — using chloride-free fertilizers only.
How it spreads. Low and mat-forming, spreading by rhizomes and underground runners. The American/wild type (var. minus) is shorter and crops once a year; the European/cultivated type (var. majus) is taller (2–16 in), spreads to about 3 ft wide, and — unusually for the genus — crops twice a year, in summer and again in autumn.
Growing tips. Extremely cold-hardy — plantings have survived winter lows of 2°F, with straw mulch or row cover recommended below 10°F where snow cover is unreliable. Watch for Phytophthora/Pythium root rot on wet or heavy soil; avoid overwatering. Well-established as a commercial crop in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, alongside substantial wild harvest — demand now outstrips wild supply in some regions.
Grow journal
Sign in to keep a dated log of when you planted, bloomed and harvested this plant.