Your BasketGourmet Fruit Preparations
Handcrafted for Cooks who Crave Flavor
Our unique fruit preparations include butters, essences, jellies, preserves, purees, and spreads handcrafted from an ever-changing variety of Wildgrown fruits, including apple, autumberry, barberry, blueberry, blackberry, cherry, dewberry, elderberry, grape, hawthorn, peach, plum, rose, serviceberry and sumac.
Wildgrown product availability and batch size is dependent upon crop availability and harvest size. Some fruits yield fewer than a dozen numbered four-ounce jars per year. Here in the Allegheny Highlands, every season is unique. We never know precisely how much of any particular product we’ll be able to offer until Mother Nature reveals her intentions. In other words, it's best to order early!
Please Contact Us to place an order now for products that have sold out. Gift boxing and Holiday wrapping are available. Whenever possible, Brightside packaging comes from 100% post-consumer recycled or natural/renewable sources.
Apple Essence, $8
Apple Jelly, $8
Basil-Scented Wild Blueberry Spread, $10
Cherry Butter, $12
Cherry-Scented Peach Preserves, $8
Elderberry & Blueberry Puree, $10
Elderberry & Raspberry Essence, $10
Elderberry Essence, $10
Grape Essence, $8
Grape Puree, $8
Mint-scented Blackberry Spread, $8
Mint-scented Peach & Hawthorn Berry Butter, $12
Peach Spread, $8
Rosehip Butter, $12
The Wildgrown Idea
Pay attention...
The forest and garden are perfect teachers.
Collaborate with Nature...
Don’t impose your will on Her. It won’t work!
Keep it simple...
Pitchforks, pruning shears, and natural cures.
Think good thoughts...
You’ll taste the difference.
At Brightside, every Wildgrown plant is cultivated with one intention: to allow Nature to produce the most nutritious, outrageously flavorful foods possible.
The Wildgrown idea is, at heart, about eating really great food. Growing great food is Nature's job--with a little help from her friends.
That's why we at Brightside Acres believe our role, first and foremost, is to pay attention to Nature. Like any good friend, we stand ready and willing to help out, or even intervene, when she needs it; and then to get out of the way when she's doing just fine on her own.
Over the years, we've found that the two most important, truly indispensable, tools at Brightside are pruning shears and pitchforks. Pruning is essential for the healthy production of apples, grapes, and blackberries. Also for maintaining forest openings where native herbs and berries thrive. Compost is Nature's preferred fertilizer. Whether mixed into vegetable beds, spread thickly under fruit trees, or soaked in water to make a tea that is sprayed on the leaves of any plant, compost is recycling at its most gratifying. Nature responds with gusto to being bathed in a bit of herself.
At Brightside, we use very little in the way of manufactured insecticides. We spray dormant oil on the apple trees in the spring. For the occasional infestation of aphids or mites on any fruit- or vegetable-bearing plant, we use a spray of soap and water. Copper dust works to control powdery mildew on squash and pumpkins when it suddenly emerges in August. Each year, we release ladybugs into the vegetable garden. We set out pheromone traps in the vineyard and orchard for Japanese Beetles. And if the beetles are really bad, we walk the rows and pick them off by hand, dropping them into cans with a bit of vegetable oil in the bottom. We keep a watchful eye for tent caterpillars, which can defoliate a tree in a matter of days. We snip the caterpillar-packed tents (which look like bags constructed of spider webs) and leave them in an exposed place, where they are sure to be a welcome snack for watchful birds and lucky amphibians and reptiles.
Wildgrown Pest Control.We do our weeding by hand, the same way we do our harvesting. Apples not allowed to drop to the ground and potatoes not bruised in harvest last a long time in storage, longer than we've ever found in grocery store produce, even produce labeled organic.
At Brightside, foods and beverages are handcrafted with as little processing, and as very few added ingredients as possible. When sugar is needed, we use unprocessed, organic turbinado sugar. When salt is required, we use sea salt. Instead of lemon juice, which has never been readily available in the Allegheny mountains, we use a concentrated form of the "lemonade" created by soaking staghorn sumac blossoms.
Wildgrown Sumac Lemonade Recipe.Wildgrown is the flavor of Nature. Once you've had a taste, anything less just won't suffice.