Berry year gathers speed

 

 

 

There are many wild strawberries this year, the cloudberries ripen in the bogs and EVERYBODY in Estonia knows bilberries.

 

The best habitats are on recently created heaths, and in heath forests but also in a bog-type landscape, all with sufficient light and shadow. The soil can be poor but must be acidic.

 

The young stems of the bilberry plant are green and angular. They become brown, round and create a cork-like surface in their fourth year. The old stems mostly die before they become ten years old, but in the soil the bilberry stems grow in a meandering rhizome network that in turn can be several tens of years old. The subsoil part is in fact almost 90% of the whole mass of the bilberry plant  and so the plant quickly starts regenerating if it is destroyed.

 

One hectare of good bilberry forest can produce over a couple of hundred kilos of berries, in a „berry year“ even more.

 

Heath pine forest (dry boreo-nemoral pine forest)