stalking Ribes nigrum

After speeding past them on my bike the other day, I decided to go back and fill up on some black currants.

In Portland, at least, currants are easy to find. Currants are frequently used as landscaping plants in Oregon as they are a mid-size slow growing shrub that is highly tolerant of less-than-perfect situations and are perfectly fine with no additional watering in the summer. It is my opinion that in this bioregion, they would make a good home/garden plant to use as a shrub bordering a sidewalk or street as they are not a needy plant. Other worthy features besides their berries are their attractive lobed palmate leaves, the racemes of pinkish flowers in the spring, and don't tend to be messy. Trimet has a good stand of them planted at 158th & Merlo by the park and ride, and you'll often see them growing on the edge of the woods here.

Ripening in late July through August and even into September, they can often be found in rather accessible public spaces and are very easy to identify which makes them relatively safe to pick for beginning foragers.

Aside from making possibly the best wine ever, they are very high in vitamin C. On a rather intriguing note: "In addition to the high levels of vitamin C, studies have also shown concentrated blackcurrant to be an effective Monoamine oxidase inhibitor" (Bormann, et al. 1991.) For more medicinal info on Ribes nigrum, go here.

So I was quite pleased to have a cool cloudy morning free to ride my bike over to a good spot where I could pick them to my heart's content. A process that requires much in the way of patience, I filled up a quart container with plump black berries before going to hang out in the park.

In the next part of my tale, I'll be talking about hazelnuts...