#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Summer continues to delight the northerners with the weather and its gifts. In the August calendar of nature, berry pickers put cloudberries at the forefront. Connoisseurs are sure: everything else can wait, but it can’t.
Household Norilsk residents have already stocked up on rhubarb, dried thyme, prepared other herbs for the winter, collected northern onions and even mushrooms.
Now it’s time for the berries. The season will last until the first frost. The first swallow in this marathon is cloudberry, in the tundra it is the rarest, most beautiful and, unfortunately, the most quickly disappearing berry.
Cloudberries contain a huge amount of vitamins C, B, A and E, and the concentration of ascorbic acid is twice as high as in oranges. Arctic raspberry, as it’s also called, is rich in phosphorus, iron, magnesium, calcium, fatty acids. It is not only healthy, but also amazingly tasty.
A tender red-haired beauty grows along the marshes, sometimes in whole glades, you just need to know the places. It is necessary to collect it not at the peak of ripening, which is easy to miss, but as if “five minutes before”, otherwise the cloudberries will be watery and lose their wonderful properties.
Last year, cloudberries ripened earlier than usual, the Norilsk people harvested the first crops already in the second half of July. In Taimyr, cloudberries were made a symbol of the Northern Berry festival, and once cloudberries inspired a Norilsk woman to create a stained-glass window.
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Text: Marina Horoshevskaya, Photo: Olga Alexandrova
