Yezberry Honey Bunch® Haskap Berry

Light Needs

Partial Sun to Full Sun

(At Least 5 Hours of Direct Sunlight)

Mature Height

3-5 Feet

Mature Spread

3-5 Feet

Growing Zones

3 to 7

If you've never heard of haskaps, it's time. And Yezberry Honey Bunch Haskap Berry is the perfect introduction to these shrubs with edible blue fruit that originated in northern Japan. The Japanese haskap is a relative of the honeysuckle, producing yellow flowers with a tubular shape in spring. But it also bears a unique fruit that tastes like a cross between a blueberry and a raspberry. It's a great fruiting shrub choice for cold regions, or zones 3 through 7.

Plant two different varieties of haskap to harvest the tasty berries beginning the third year of the plant's growth. The Yezberry Honey Bunch Haskap Berry is a dwarf variety, so it reaches 3 to 5 feet tall at maturity. This makes it a great border or screen plant that does double duty: it's attractive in your landscape and has edible fruit. Yezberry also is small enough to enjoy as a container thriller. Plant several as a hedge for pretty yellow spring color followed by deep blue fruit.

Yezberry Honey Bunch Haskap Berry Care

Be sure to plant your Yezberry Honey Bunch in full or partial sun. The shrubs need little to no maintenance and average water. If you want to prune your haskap or a hedge of haskaps for shape, do so after harvesting fruit in early summer. The haskap is deer resistant, but once it starts producing fruit, you might have to keep birds at bay until harvest. The flowers of Yezberry Honey Bunch Haskap Berry also attract bees and other pollinating insects who help pollinate your plants for later fruit.

Note: This plant will require another Yezberry® variety to be planted within 60 feet of this in order cross pollinate each plant and to produce fruit.

Yezberry Honey Bunch Haskap Berry Spacing

Yezberry Honey Bunch Haskap Berry (Lonicera caerulea) also is known as Japanese Haskap. Space hedge plants about 4 feet apart. To ensure fruiting, you need to plant Yezberry Honey Bunch and another haskap variety within 50 feet of one another.

Interesting Fact(s) - Yezberry® Japanese haskaps are closely related to best-selling Sugar Mountain®sweetberry honeysuckle. However, the Yezberry series was developed from purely Japanese strains of haskap, while the Sugar Mountain series is of Russian heritage. Other differences: Yezberry haskaps bloom a bit later, so they're a good choice for areas that get frequent spring frosts. Yezberry fruits are plumper and rounder than Sugar Mountain fruits, but both are equally tasty and heavy-bearing when it comes to harvest time.