What Berries Grow Wild in Montana

Which berries grow wild in Montana?

More than most people can name. The huckleberry gets the attention and deserves most of it, but it shares these mountains with half a dozen others that show up in jars, pies and pancake syrup across the state. This is what grows here, and what each one is good for.

Huckleberry

The one Montana is known for. Small, deep purple, somewhere between a blueberry and a black currant with more acid and more perfume than either.

Nobody farms them. Huckleberries resist cultivation, so every berry sold in this state was picked by hand off a wild plant on a mountainside, which is why the season is short and the price is what it is.

Chokecherry

The most common wild fruit in Montana and the one most people write off. Bite one raw and your whole mouth puckers, which is where the name comes from.

Cooked with sugar it becomes something else entirely, deep red and almost like a wild cherry, and it makes the jelly and syrup that show up on breakfast tables all over the state. Chokecherries grow along creek bottoms, fence lines and roadsides across most of Montana, so they are far easier to find than huckleberries.

Serviceberry

Also called saskatoon or juneberry depending on who you ask. Purple, round, and sweeter and milder than either the huckleberry or the chokecherry, with a faint almond note from the seeds.

Serviceberries were a staple long before anyone was making jelly out of them, dried and pounded into pemmican with meat and fat. They still make one of the better wild pies in the state.

Wild raspberry

Smaller and more intensely flavored than anything at a grocery store, growing in old burns, clearings and along logging roads. Anyone who has picked them knows the trade, which is that you leave with scratched arms and half of what you picked already eaten.

Thimbleberry

A raspberry relative with a broad soft leaf and a fruit so delicate it collapses when you pick it. Nobody ships thimbleberries anywhere because they will not survive the trip, so the only way to eat one is to find it yourself. Worth doing.

Buffaloberry

Bright red, seriously tart, and growing on silver-leafed shrubs on dry hillsides where little else fruits. Too sour for most people straight off the bush, and it turns into a sharp jelly that goes better with game meat than with toast.

Why so many berries and so little farming

What do these have in common? Montana's growing season is short, the elevation is high, and the mountain soils are thin and acidic. That combination is hard on orchards and easy on tough, low-growing native shrubs that have been doing this for a long time without help.

So Montana's fruit tradition never became an agricultural industry the way apples did in Washington. It stayed what it has always been, which is people with buckets walking into the hills in late summer and coming back with enough to put up for the year.

Questions we get

Can I pick wild berries in Montana? On most public land, yes, for personal use. Rules differ between national forests, state land and tribal land, and some areas set limits, so check with the agency that manages the ground before you go.

When is berry season? Late summer for most of these, running earlier at low elevation and later up high. Elevation matters more than the calendar, which is why a good picker follows the season uphill.

Why can nobody farm huckleberries? They depend on mountain soil conditions and forest relationships that have resisted every serious attempt to reproduce them in a field. People keep trying.

Which one should I try first? Huckleberry if you want to understand what the fuss is about. Chokecherry if you want the one Montanans grew up eating.

Where to find us

Chalet Market of Montana, 6410 Jackrabbit Ln, Belgrade, MT 59714. Call us at (406) 388-4687, or browse the jam and syrup shelf.