Farkleberry: a Beautiful Cultural Plant

"Farkleberry"is a crazy sounding name. The same plant also goes by the names "winter huckleberry" and "sparkleberry", but I prefer to call it by its "farkleberry"alias. The more confidently you can use this name, the better, especially in formal presentations. I don't mind the strange looks this gets me.

Despite its funny sounding common name, farkleberry (see I did it again), is a seriously cool and little known cultural plant. It's species name is Vaccinium arboreum, and it grows across an area that spans from the Florida peninsula to central Oklahoma. Here at Nan Awaya Farm, we're just a few miles away from the official western limit of its range, but it thrives on our dry, sandy hills. It is very tolerant of heat, blazing sun, and droughty soils. It grows as a bush up to about 10ft tall in our open woodland and invades prairie areas that haven't been burned or mowed in a while. Right now, it's leaves are starting to turn a pretty red color, and its branches are absolutely loaded with the fruits that you see in the title image.

Maudell Meshaya was a friend and cultural mentor of ours, who grew up in this part of the reservation. To her, this plant was oksak okchi (meaning literally hickory nut juice). Other Choctaw names are hvshtula sehpa (winter blueberry) and sehpa chahta (tall blueberry). Maudell speculated that the Choctaw name hickory nut juice might have been given to this plant because its berries can have an astringent taste, like unripe hickory nuts. She told me that her family used to make them into walakshi, Choctaw dumplings.

This weekend, the black colored fruits are at their prime. About the size of an English pea, they have a pleasant flavor, when at full ripeness. I was trying to think of the best way to describe it - something like a really sweet wild blueberry crossed with a hint of English green pea flavor. Then it dawned on me, they taste just about like the large-sized commercial blueberries that you can buy frozen at any grocery store. Farkleberries (at least the ones that grow around here) have inedible seeds and tough skins. Countless times in the fall, I've stopped by a farkleberry bush to pick a handfull of fruits, chewed on them to get out all of the sweet goodness, and then spat out the rest. This weekend, I decided to pick enough to make walakshi.

Farkleberries usually form individually on the branch, rarely in clumps. This, combined with their small size can make them slow to pick. Still, with no thorns or biting insects to contend with, the task is not at all unpleasant. The farkleberries growing on the undersides of the bush's branches and on the tips of the limbs can be quickly hand-stripped into a wide container held underneath (I used our colander). The berries also grow on the interior of the branches, all the way to the core of the bush. These are much slower to pick. I walked over to a bush growing within sight of our house. In an hour, I had half a gallon of farkleberries. This was maybe 1/20 of what the bush held.

Since the berries contain inedible bits, I decided to go about creating the dumplings by processing the fruits into a strained juice to boil the dumplings in. Adding water to the berries made the leaves float and easier to remove. I brought the cleaned berries to a roaring boil, then simmered them as I was writing this post. The aroma reminded me of the aroma of the juice we used to make from prickly pear cactus fruits when I lived in New Mexico. After allowing the simmered farkleberries to cool for a bit, I mashed them and strained the liquid through a mesh bag (image). The flavor of the reddish purple juice is incredible, easily beating my expectations - something like a rich, superior blueberry juice.

I followed the Indigenous, 2-ingrdient recipe for walakshi, stirring some of the boiling juice into cornmeal and forming the resultant sticky, purple-colored dough into dumplings (image). I dropped these into the juice at a rolling boil and then let it simmer for half an hour. Farkleberries contain the same cancer-fighting antioxidants as their cousin, the blueberry, which is considered a superfood. Farkleberries might have these in even higher concentrations due to their darker color. I'm sure they're also full of vitamin C, fiber, and an array of other micronutrients.

Farkleberry walakshi has the same stellar taste as the juice. We've made and enjoyed tasty walakshi using wild blueberries from the store a number of times. This is objectively even better. Making farkleberry walakshi does require a little bit of effort - you can't find them in any grocery store- but it is a beautiful tasty dish. It comes from the Choctaw homeland as well as the Choctaw Nation Reservation, and is a deep part of culture. I'm grateful to Maudell, for our past conversations that inspired me to try making the dish this weekend. One of the of the finished dumplings is pictured below, in a mussel shell spoon, held in front of the same bush that these berries were gathered from.

The farkleberry plant has other benefits besides being an ingredient in some high-level walakshi. In the spring, the bush's white flowers help feed native bees and other pollinators. The fruits are edible, not just to people, but also black bears, chipmunks, bobwhites, and robins. Like most other native plants, they have impeccable timing. Farkleberries set their fruit late in the season after the other species of blueberries/huckleberries are done. Added on to that, farkleberries can stay ripe on the branch for an extended period, making the nutrition they contain available to animals and people into winter. The bushes also provide cover and habitat diversity on the landscape. I've seen the trunks at the base of the bush grow to 4 inches in diameter, but they can get a lot bigger. Their heartwood has a beautiful, deep-reddish color that makes gorgeous knife handles among other things.

I also like to make arrow shafts from the shoots of the farkleberry bush. They grow pretty straight for their first season; then, the next year's growth tends to shoot off at an angle. It's easy to find straight farkleberry shoots to make 25-inch arrow shafts. The 30-inch shafts that I need for my wingspan are a lot rarer. Of course, not everyone has my long arms. I'm sure farkleberry arrows were used by people living on this landscape in the past to feed their families. I'm sure that they featured prominently in many long-forgotten stories witnessed by these hills. Pictured here are some 30-inch arrows I've made from farkleberry shoots that come from Nan Awaya Farm. One is last year's practice arrow; I made the other two this weekend.

Thank you for taking the time to share this cool piece of culture with us. If you've made it this far, I'd like to share something exciting. This is our first post in a while because for the past 9 months, just about all of my writing time has been going into completing the second edition of the Choctaw Food book. A limited, pre-publication printing was offered at the Choctaw Labor Day Festival and sold out in 20 minutes. That draft faced some crazy computer glitches shortly before going to press - One day the system took out all of the "f"s in the entire document. Other times, the same edit had to be made 6 times before the system would accept it, only to disappear again a week later. Trying to find and fix and re-fix all of those (not entirely successfully) prevented the final flurry of word-smithing and quality-checking that books usually benefit from. Now, the typos have been fixed; the extra efforts have been made, and the book is complete to the very best of my ability. Barring more unforeseen challenges, the final, main printing will be released in late November. Building on the first edition of Choctaw Food (which came out in 2019), the second edition contains 70,000 more words of cultural content, many new images, new archival findings, and insights that have been gained through the past 6 years of living on Nan Awaya Farm. Stay tuned. We'll do another post when it becomes available.