Harvesting with the Grandkids
Recipe for Beautyberry Jam
You won’t find beautyberries in the supermarket.
Aren’t they beautiful? We grow beautyberries (Callicarpa americana) in our Florida backyard garden. It is a native shrub that we often see growing in gardens and in forested areas nearby. The bees and butterflies love the flowers and the birds and squirrels love the berries.
It flowers in late spring with the berries forming in the summer. We usually harvest them in August. The grandkids do most of the harvest work. They pick the berries, sorting out the ripe ones from the few unripe berries and picking out the leaves and stems. We harvest 6 cups of berries to use to make jam but we always leave berries for the wildlife to eat too.
Next, we bring them in to rinse off any dirt and also to pick out the last of the ants, leaves, and stems.
