Red Huckleberries - trying to grow from seed

Red Huckleberries are native to my area. They also tolerate low light conditions of which I've got a lot. However, to produce well, they need about 5 hours of sunshine, and the birds like them, which means most years I don't get many of them.

The PNW ones are very tiny and time-consuming to pick. However, they were an Indigenous food source and their nutritional value is good. They are incredibly pretty sprinkled into a muffin recipe I make. So I decided I  would like to try again at increasing the plants available to pick from.

One site said this: "Another report says that it is best to sow the seed in a greenhouse as soon as it is ripe. Once they are about 5cm tall, prick the seedlings out into individual pots and grow them on in a lightly shaded position in the greenhouse for at least their first winter. Plant them out into their permanent positions in late spring or early summer, after the last expected frosts."
https://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/pal/growing-huckleberries-from-seed/ That's a library in Washington, so hopefully the research they did was better than what I could do.

So I had picked berries today, but there was a small group that had been bird pecked which I set aside. I then mashed the pecked ones in water and swirled it around and a bunch of seeds fell to the bottom. I poured the water and mash off and rinsed so I'd be able to see the miniscule things.

Next I made up a "fake it" wicking pot using a scrap from a cotton sweatshirt and two oval ice cream containers. I filled it with my usual potting soil. However, the wet seeds just stuck to my fingers and my tweezers... argghhhh! Not to be defeated, I took a couple tablespoons of some quite dry potting soil, added it to the seeds and stirred very thoroughly. Then I spread this out on the top of my pot. Want to bet that despite my effort, they will all come up in a tight cluster? It's that sort of a day!

This is not going to be easy - they don't transplant worth beans. I tried layering years ago, but the few that layered, didn't survive transplantation. These things are fussy. However, I know more than I knew then. I've got a couple of ideas of places they might like to grow. That said, if anyone has any ideas of how to proceed assuming they germinate, I'd greatly appreciate your thoughts.

However, if I get enough of them, I think they might be a good plant for adding to tree guilds as an understory plant. They tolerate a certain amount of cedar judging from where they've grown wild on my land. And equally important, the deer don't seem to munch them to death!

I look forward to hearing about your results. Almost all red huckleberries I see are growing on nurse stumps or nurse trees so maybe you could find some punky wood and put a layer of leaf litter on top of that with the seeds sandwiched between the leaves and kept damp all fall and winter in a shady spot. That is what would best recreate what I imagine the germination conditions to be in the woods where they grow.

Ours are fairly deep in the shade of the woods so we don't get too many berries and we have to be walking the trails almost daily to catch them when they are ripe before the birds get them.

My dad, on the other hand, has an acre that was cleared deep in a forest and so his wood line has lots of well established berries that, now they are exposed to the sun, produce like gangbusters.

The biggest bush I have ever seen was at my grandparents' house (in the Seattle area) by their front door on top of a very large and tall stump. It got the perfect amount of sun and shade and produced large, sweet abundant berries. I remember as a little kid picking enough that my grandma said we could make a pie. It was, in my memory, the most delicious thing I had ever eaten in my young life. I've never been able to pick enough berries in the 30+ years since to recreate that pie. I would love to find out if red huckleberry pie is as good as I remember.  I should try them in muffins. Sprinkled on ice cream is pretty delicious.

I wonder if you could contact some if the native plant sales run by the various counties and find out where they get their red huckleberry seedlings that they sell and if their sources would share their germination secrets?

I've always thought it quite mean of them to sell those seedlings since I've never heard of anyone having success transplanting them. But someone somewhere is obviously successfully germinating them well enough to get seedlings to sell.

Jenny Wright wrote:I look forward to hearing about your results. Almost all red huckleberries I see are growing on nurse stumps or nurse trees so maybe you could find some punky wood and put a layer of leaf litter on top of that with the seeds sandwiched between the leaves and kept damp all fall and winter in a shady spot.

Yes, many of our big huckleberries are on stumps, however, the patch I'm picking from also has several plants that appear to have germinated on the ground which is protected by a large stump behind it.

We did try twice chain-sawing the top off a stump and transplanting it with its Huckleberry bush, but they also did not seem to survive. As you noted, the plants need sun to produce, but they also don't seem to like full sun or dry soil. If enough of my experimental seeds germinate, it will allow me to plant them in a bunch of different spots in the hope that some of them will be happy and grow for me!

I did plant a couple of Elderberry plants last year, and I've heard that Elderberry and Huckleberry coexist nicely. The Huckleberry also seem to tolerate having Cedar near them or even above them. I will definitely be using lots of punky wood in the planting process.

The Fake-it Mini Wicking pot I made for them to germinate in, is working very well. In fact I made two more like it and put a few lettuce seeds in each one to see how it works for lettuce! It is hard to grow tasty lettuce at this time of year in my climate, but it's nice to add to sandwiches and I'm using saved seed, so I decided to give it a try, as the Huckleberry seeds aren't due until the end of July and it's only the beginning now! I'm sort of doing two experiments in one with "a new pot" and "difficult seeds", so the lettuce experiment may teach me more about wicking pots!