Slightly Sooty Salad: Juneberries in July

Juneberries are the tastiest berries you’ve likely never tasted. The flavor of a juneberry at peak ripeness easily rivals the taste of any berry I have ever eaten. But in order to have that experience when you taste a juneberry, it’s probably better to underestimate how good your experience is going to be. Some juneberry bushes don’t make a particularly good berry. The berries can be bland and mushy if their planting location is getting beaten heavily by the sun. Or they can be sour if they aren’t getting enough sun. If you do find a good berry, when you taste it, you’ll find the sweetness of the kind found in the blue-purple family of berries. There isn’t much tartness, a potential downside. But then there’s something more. A whisper of vanilla or almond essence from the barely noticeable and edible seed, maybe? However you describe it, it’s a flavor you will want to experience again.

The timing of these juneberry revelations is not ideal. It’s almost July. Most of the New York City juneberries that I’m familiar with are somewhat shriveled. Please add a calendar reminder for 2027 to check for juneberries starting in the first week of June. However, there are a few varieties of juneberries, and they have slightly different ripening schedules, so there may still be some late-ripening berries to be discovered here in Brooklyn. If you have any travels planned to the north in the next few weeks, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with this plant and berry. I ate underripe juneberries at Mongaup Pond Campground on July 4 weekend last summer, so there is still time left on the juneberry clock.

The juneberry has many names. Some know them as serviceberry or Saskatoon or shadbush. Juneberries are downright pretty. Juneberries are similar in overall size and shape to blueberries, but blueberries tend to be more uniformly colored when ripe. The color of a fully ripened juneberry is sometimes similar to a blueberry, but delicious juneberries are also found in many different shades and combinations of red and purple. If you look at the bottom of a juneberry, the sepals left over from the juneberry flowers, also known as the calyx, tend to be more prominent than those left on blueberries. Because the juneberry’s spring flowers are white, showy and come early in the spring, it has become a very popular shrub in unlikely locations for fruit-picking, like mall parking lots or office hellscapes, I mean landscapes. Once you see a juneberry in person, you won’t forget its color. Then you can look more closely at any blue-ish, purple-ish berry you see in this world, and you’re likely to start noticing these bushes popping up in unexpected places. Juneberries can occur as multi-stemmed shrubs as small as 4 feet, or they can be single-stemmed trees usually topping out around 25 feet. Have you heard of the National Champion Tree Program? I hadn’t either. One of their National Champion Tree awards went to the tallest known juneberry, measured at 69 feet tall.

New York City has many juneberry bushes and trees of various sizes and shapes. You can find them in Prospect Park along the path just south of the ice-skating rink, scattered throughout Green-Wood Cemetery and even planted as street trees right here in Sunset Park. My personal favorite place to pick large amounts of juneberries is outside the Whole Foods Market on 3rd Avenue and 3rd Street. There are several 10- to 12-foot-tall, multi-stemmed trees scattered around the lot and particularly along the store’s southern exterior wall. They are heavily laden with berries every year. The results of soil testing from underneath these Gowanus-adjacent trees strongly suggest that clean soil was brought in when they did the landscaping at the store.

The best way to eat a juneberry is right off the tree. The second-best way is soon after you get them home and rinse them off. They tend to get soft quickly, and their flavor suffers if you try to keep them in the refrigerator. We have dehydrated them in the past, and the flavor is not as good as fresh, but they turn into a unique and enjoyable raisin-like-thing. I’ve read that they can be used to make a tasty fruit leather as well.

I hope you find a juneberry or two to sample in 2026! Feel free to share your juneberry stories with slightlysooty@gmail.com.