Common Myrtle

While cutting back some of the myrtle I discovered small blue berries and I started to wonder...
It was a shrub of the small leafed common myrtle- called tarentina. The berries are very small.

I googled a bit and found out that you can actually eat those berries. Well- they do not taste very good... bitter. 

I looked for the bigger version of the shrub with the bigger berries- they look very similar to blueberries.
I read somewhere that you can make jam- best mixed with apples. I did some trials and came up with something that was edible. Actually a quite nice jam but you need a lot of berries to end up with a decent amount of jam and it is a bit of work.
I tried to make a jam with only the berries and it turned out too bitter so you need to mix it with apples (or another fruit).

Myrtle berries have a lot of seeds and you don't want them in the jam so you need to squeeze everything through a sieve.

For the jam I used:

1 part berries (cooked with a bit of water, crushed in the blender and strained though a sieve)
1 part cooked apples (also smashed in the blender)
1 part sugar 

I mixed the strained myrtle berries and smashed apples and cooked them together with the sugar and a bit of lemon juice, adding a bit water when I had a feeling it turned too thick.

You can also make tea from the leaves. The leaves are very aromatic and give off a pleasant fragrance when crushed. I tried to make tea, but so far could not really detect the same fragrance in a tea.
I read that in Sardinia they make a liquor from the berries. I wonder how that tastes.

Common myrtle is grown here quite a lot. It is native to the Mediterranean region and is thus great for the plant varieties we prefer in the public Kibbutz gardens.