FungRadar

Cowberry

Vaccinium vitis-idaea

Dry pine woods, lichen heath, sandy ridges and the drier ground between bogs. It does not grow with wet feet, and that is the first thing separating it from cranberry.

Cowberry — botanical illustration
Cowberrydark dots on the underside of the leaf
Do not confuse it. Bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) shares the ground and the red berry. It is not poisonous — dry, mealy and disappointing — but it is a different plant: bearberry leaves are plain beneath, cowberry leaves are dotted with dark glands on the underside. The serious neighbour is mezereon (Daphne mezereum), whose red berries sit directly on a bare stem with no stalk and no leaves around them; it is poisonous and the sap blisters skin. Leaf undersides and berry stalks are both worth reading, and neither settles it alone: look at the whole plant, its height and whether it is woody to the ground.

The leaves stay green through winter, so the plant can be found in any month. Fruit picked after the first frosts is sweeter and softer, and it travels badly. It is sold in shops as lingonberry.

Where people are picking now

the best place in the region — not an average over the region. Regions are ranked by today's number.

The fraction beside the stage says how many measurement points out of how many the region was computed from. “1/22” means the weather history was long enough at one place out of twenty-two: the number describes that place, not the whole region.

  1. Friuli-Venezia Giuliaripe100
  2. Trentino-Alto Adigeripe100
  3. Venetoripe100
  4. Abruzzoripening99
  5. Valle d'Aostaripening99
  6. Emilia-Romagnaripening96
  7. Liguriaripe92
  8. Ticinoripe76
  9. Toscanadropping69
  10. Piemonteripening2/4945
  11. Apuliadropping0
  12. Basilicatadropping0

The forecast is computed for 23 regions out of 583. The rest are not listed — that is "not computed", not "no berries".

Map

The field is built from a network of measurement points, the way a meteorologist draws a rainfall map from a network of stations: the value is computed at each point and interpolated between them. A cell is about 250 km² across, which is the resolution our weather data comes at, and we do not draw it finer: that would be invented precision. Only the “how much” goes into the colour, not the stage: “a little, ripe” and “plenty, still green” look the same on the map — read the stage on the card. Blank cells are where the season history was too short to compute, not where the berry is absent.

All berries, compared for today

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