• Tuesday-What'sUP August 15 - 08:30 pm

Yes, you heard me right... it's thimbleberry picking time here in the Keweenaw. Those delicious red berries with a somewhat tart taste, transform into the most delectable jam and pies and now is the time to get out to your favorite patch and get picking.

Barb Bouwkamp her hubby, Tom and four legged friend, Parker, were out in the woods in search of the elusive red berries recently. She gives the following explanation for why thimbleberry jam is so expensive, compared to other fresh berry jam:

"First you have to find an old logging road, with ditches where the berries grow. Then you have to fight the terrain, with downed trees, bramble bushes and wild life, including wasps, bees and other flying insects. You pick for a half hour and you barely cover the bottom on your bucket…and then you trip on a branch and spill the little you have in there. You forget where you saw those unripe berries earlier, that you planned to go back to get and when you finally remember, you find someone else in "your secret patch". After several hours picking you have enough for a few jars of jam."

Can't wait to order some of that great jam this year........it's always such a treat. Didn't realize it was that hard to accumulate a bunch of those berries!

I bet the doggie helps. ;O)

...or you can do it the hard way and hick up those steps at The Jampot :-)
Nice pix...I especially like the first one: a man and his dog in the woods.

first time I went thimble berry picking, was with my mom, she took me. yes, you have to be careful of the ditches....not fun to fall in and not fun to have your mom laugh at you when you fall into one....how I wish I can go berry picking with her again. ;O)

hope parker is o.k.

Poor Parker, hope his injury was just minor and that he's alright now.
I'd never heard of thimbleberries until I joined this site many years ago. Since I love berries, I'd love to taste one.

thank you, pasty.com for the nostalgic pictures and
i know these are current. i also picked
thimbleberries with my mom when i was young.
mom would preserve thimbleberry jam, as well
as strawberry, raspberry and blueberry for the
winter season.

mom knew of some patches of thimbleberries
even though she did not grow up in the area.

thimblebery preserves are my favorite to this day.

shirley, a sumptious taste is offered by
the jam lady, and the jampot.

Hi
We don't get thimbleberries in the northern lower, but we do have blackberries and black raspberries (at least, we used to have such near our cabin until the utility company eradicated them along the power lines). But, back in the day, our Malemute dog Misty would come with us. She would eat the berries right off the bushes, like a bear--she wasn't a help but competition.

Mary Drew at Pasty Central (Mdrew):
"…Barb Bouwkamp her hubby, Tom and four legged friend, Parker, were out in the woods in search of the elusive red berries recently. …

mickill mouse (Ram4):
"I bet the doggie helps. ;O)"

I guess thimbleberry hunting — with a "Thimbleberry Dog" — is a bit like truffle hunting with a "Truffle dog"? 😉

mickill mouse (Ram4):
"hope parker is o.k."

Ditto!

Nice pictures of a nice outing in the woods. I am a big fan of berries but the thimbleberry is one I never developed a taste for. I've tried often but they sure miss the spot. To each his own so all you thimbleberry fans can feel free to divvy up my share. The good thing about picking them for the most part is you don't have to bend over very far.

Would love to visit the Jampot, George, unfortunately it's way UP there and I'm way down here and not physically able to travel anymore.:<

Years ago we were at Mill Creek park near Mackinaw City and saw berries we didn't recognize. Shortly thereafter we were educated on Pasty Cam ~ they turned out to be thimbleberries. Wonder if they are still there......

Jbuck, I stand corrected; there are thimbleberries in the northern lower, at Mill Creek as you note. But none in the woods my family did our berry picking in.

Shirley Waggoner (Shirlohio):
"Would love to visit the Jampot, George, unfortunately it's way UP there and I'm way down here and not physically able to travel anymore.:<"

Ahh, but the Jam Pot does ship — and I'm working on an order as I write this! 😉
The "Jam Lady" also ships! … Their Thimbleberry and Rose Hip syrups may win me over.
(Decisions, decisions!)

We make our own jam. I should say that Ron makes
our own jam, lol. It's so good. Thimbleberries
are an acquired taste. First time I tasted them
didn't like them. Now I love them. We picked
some while we were there but never had the chance
to really go pick. We did get quite a few
blueberries, though. They were so plentiful.
And boy were they good. Have already had
blueberry pancakes. We probably only got enough
thimbleberries for about 2 or 3 jars. But it's
better than nothing. And it's a lot cheaper to
make than to buy. That stuff is worth its weight
in gold. Great pictures. Hope the dog is okay.
And yep, you really have to be careful when
you're picking them.

Deb S. (Usedtobeayooper):
"… Thimbleberries are an acquired taste. …"

The same goes for Lingonberries and the rare, vaunted and expensive Cloudberries (the latter predominantly from Finland.) I found then pretty underwhelming.:

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Quote:

"In Finland the berries are eaten with heated "leipäjuusto" (a local cheese; the name translates to "bread-cheese"), as well as cream and sugar. In Sweden, cloudberries and cloudberry jam are used as a topping for ice cream, pancakes, and waffles. In Norway, they are often mixed with whipped cream and sugar to be served as a dessert called "Multekrem" (Cloudberry cream), as a jam or as an ingredient in homemade ice cream."

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Would love to try them all!!!!

Ron is a "keeper" for sure!

Shirley...just click your heals together and say:" There's no place like UP...there's no place like UP!"
...and Jampot, I'll expect my commission check next week :-)

I've always loved all sorts of berries. I am actually quite fond of cloudberries, although I never heard them called that before. When I was a kid, we called them multe. I learned their English name as bakeapple.

...hike up, even. (thank God I'm an accountant.)

Duane, I'm traveling with you, ready to pounce on any thimbleberry you shed. I absolutely love them, and for me, they have probably the most intriguing and complex flavor of anything I've ever eaten. I once spent some time talking with a guy in Copper Harbor about how to describe it, and we came up with a mix of raspberries, currants, maybe a hint of orange, and something else completely undefinable. However you describe it, it just makes me want more.

Great pictures, had to laugh at Barb's explanation. Hope Parker didn't hurt himself. I'm with Alex, the Jam Pot or the Jam lady.... much easier. My mom and aunts use to make us kids pick berries, I hated it, ate more than I put in the bucket!

FRNash and Dr. Nat,

Don't forget the Lakka, a Cloudberry liqueur. I
used to travel to Finland quite a bit and it was
popular with some, but it always seemed to be one
of the things highly recommended by many to be
brought home. Lakka is simply Finnish for
Cloudberry

D. A. (Midwested):

"FRNash and Dr. Nat,

Don't forget the Lakka, a Cloudberry liqueur. I used to travel to Finland quite a bit and it was popular with some, but it always seemed to be one of the things highly recommended by many to be brought home. Lakka is simply Finnish for Cloudberry"

I have to wonder about that "Cloudberry liqueur", it must be pretty potent stuff! A few other translations of "Lakka" :

• lacquer
• lacker (a variant of "lacquer"?)
• varnish
• sealing wax
• dope (yes, that kind! 😈)

FRNash,

Indeed. With only 20% as many words as English,
context is everything.

Finnish is a difficult language to master.
Instead of all of our prepositions, pronouns
and verb tenses, they seem to just keep adding
letters to words in order to say something
different.

Unlike Germany, American TV is not dubbed but
instead just subtitled in Finnish. Sometimes a
couple of words spoken would fill the screen
with Finnish words. At other times long
conversations would be summarized with just 3
or 4 VERY long words.

Other than the typical greetings, the only
thing I kept handy was:

Onko kukaan puhu Englanti?

(Does anyone here speak English?)

D. A. (Midwested):
"…Sometimes a couple of words spoken [in English] would fill the screen with Finnish words. At other times long conversations would be summarized with just 3 or 4 VERY long words. …"

Yes, I've seen some Finnish subtitles! That also reminds me of the days on da farm farm in Bruce Crossing way back in the early 1950's when I used to read my granddad's copies of two Finnish papers of the time ("Opas" [translation: "Guide"] and "Valvoja" [translation: "Observer"]).

Finnish — In newspaper columns? Hah! Many single words had to be "folded" at the column margins over several lines!

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Quote:

Extremes of agglutination (Wikipedia):
"The official Guinness world record is Finnish:
epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän "Wonder if he can also ... with his capability of not causing things to be unsystematic".

"It has the derived word epä·järje·st·el·mä·llis·tyttä·mä·ttö·m·yys as the root
and is lengthened with the inflectional endings -llä·nsä·kään·kö·hän.

"However, this word is grammatically unusual,
since -kään "also" is used only in negative clauses, but -kö (question) only in question clauses."

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Quote:

Longest words (Wikipedia):
"If one allows artificial constructs as well as using clitics and conjugated forms, one can create even longer words: such as … kumarreksituteskenteleentuvaisehkollaismaisekkuudellisenneskenteluttelemattomammuuksissansakaankopahan (102 letters), which was created by Artturi Kannisto."

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I've had thimbleberry jam. Delicious.

Are Thimbleberries an acquired taste? Yes, try them once and you will be hooked...

If you enjoy liqueur, cloudberry liqueur is really good. It's readily available in Scandanavian countries, but I'm not sure how easy it is to find in the U.S.

We have some that has an alcohol content of 21%, and the label says Lapponia Wild Berry Liqueurs in Turku, Finland.

I can't find a company web site, but it appears to be made by a company called Oy Scanfrentz Ab.

The page below has some information about the product.

Lapponia Lakka Cloudberry

I LOVE THIS GROUP!!!!!!!!!!! So informative; &
like we're just a big group of friends! :)

From my previous post:

FRNash/PHX, AZ (Frnash) on Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - 06:12 pm:

"… The "Jam Lady" also ships! … Their Thimbleberry and Rose Hip syrups may win me over. …

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Quote:

"Create a customer profile with The Jam Lady which allows you to shop faster, track the status of your current orders and review your previous orders."

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Quote:

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

My order (at "My Account" today (August 24) still shows "Pending"?
In spite of it being shipped (USPS Priority Mail) on August 14?
No shipping notification, no tracking information?

I really had no desire to have my package sitting on my front porch in Phoenix, AZ at 100°F or more, as it did before I "accidentally" discovered it 5 hours after it was placed there!

The package bore a scannable, bar-coded tracking number, but tracking it is a bit pointless after it has been delivered!

Postage found on package: Thirty peel-and-stick 49c postage stamps, plus a 47c postage meter stamp? REALLY?

Have you heard?
From the USPS:
"Want to save time and ship from home? You can pay for postage and print a shipping label right from your own [computer and] printer. Plus, you can schedule a pickup right from your home or office" with USPS Click-N-Ship®

See: Click-N-Ship

And last but not least:
At least I'm not planning on returning any merchandise. That could be quite a problem, since the shipping address shown in your web site Instructions:

"Please return merchandise via UPS or United States Postal Service to ensure safe and traceable delivery. Use the following shipping address for all returns. Thank you.

The Jam Lady
5055 State Highway M-26
Mohawk, MI 49950"

Is NOT A VALID ADDRESS according to the USPS!

The Jam Lady: What a throwback to the 19th century!
Do you deliver your outbound shipments to the Post Office in a horse-drawn wagon, too?

I have had about enough of this "19th century" experience.
In the three years since my last order, you have clearly still not joined the 21st century!

Next time I'll be ordering from the monks at the "Jam Pot"!

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