Broken Tine: IS THE HASKAP CANADA’S NEXT GREAT BERRY? BY ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH
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decade ago any mention of haskap berries was likely met with little more than a scratch of the head or a blank stare. While these uniquely oblong berries, often also called honeysuckle or honeyberry, or by the technical name lonicera caerulea, have grown considerably in popularity over the last few years, they’re still largely unknown or misunderstood by many fruit lovers. Kreg Alde, the farmer behind Broken Tine Orchard near Beaverlodge, Alberta is making it his mission to make haskaps the go-to berry in Alberta and the rest of Western Canada. Alde started growing haskaps in 2012. He’s a fourth-generation farmer and his family has always grown grain, but when
28 Culinaire | July/August 2021
he took over his family farm and was looking for a way to diversify his crops, he stumbled on haskaps, a fruit that, like most people, he had never heard of before. As a lifelong berry lover Alde was interested in growing a fruit hardy enough for the Alberta climate. He was considering huckleberries, but his research pointed him towards Russian honeyberries — which, by sheer coincidence he actually found growing wild on his land as remnants of a midcentury agriculture research program conducted by the federal government — though he quickly discovered that the berries were too bitter to eat. This led Alde to the University of Saskatoon, where
researchers had been breeding a hybrid of lonicera caerulea plants from two parts of Russia and Japan that produced plump and juicy berries that were far superior to those wild honeyberries on Alde’s farm. “The berries from Japan were a sweeter, larger berry and when the University bred them with the two varieties from Russia it created a hardier northern version. It was all done through old fashioned breeding techniques,” Alde says. “Now we've gotten more and more newer varieties as well. They grow really well in Canada and taste amazing. It's like a cross between a huckleberry and raspberry.” Alde secured some cultivators from the University and Broken Tine was born.
