I've got a small tree growing by the garage that has pea-sized blue-black berries. I think it might be a huckleberry, or maybe a hackberry, or maybe something else. I spent hours on the net comparing leaves, berries and geographic ranges with limited success at getting a tight definition.

There are dozen's of variants of every type of tree this might be, all very similar, but not quite identical to what I've got.

Many of the possibilities are the same family as whortleberries, which are a pleasant sweet/tart berry popular in northern Europe. I pick up whortleberry juice when I go to the Eastern European grocery on Packard.

The berries from my tree are sweet and tart, must like whortleberries. I've eaten a few of them in the past with no bad effect, so I decided to collect a cup or so and try to juice them.

I've got a hand-operated food-processor that has a circular mesh thing that I think is supposed to remove water from rinsed salad greens.

I figured this would be a nice centrifuge for extracting the juice from berry pulp.

So, I dumped the cup of berries into the mesh thing, mashed them with a spoon, turned the crank and spun them.

This actually worked! I ended up with a couple ounces of dark-blue, almost inky juice in the container around the spinner.

Now, most of the trees that this might be are totally safe, some are mildly toxic, and a couple need to be cooked to be safe for eating. My best guess was that this tree was one of the totally safe ones.

Still, I like to think I'm crazy, not stupid, so I diluted the juice with water, then diluted that with some apple cider, and then drank just a few swallows.

One of the potential identifications for my tree lists the berry as edible, but a powerful laxative.

We have a winner!

By the end of the evening, I was considering calling UMich and scheduling a right-now colonoscopy. Why waste waste this marvelous opportunity?

By Wednesday morning, I was back to normal and hungry.