Look before you reap should be emblazoned on every seed catalog I read.

Instead, I blithely order “interesting” offerings, caught up in the romance of growing something unique or something old or something I’ve never eaten but wouldn’t mind growing even if I have no idea what it looks like at maturity.

Enter the garden huckleberry.

I spied it in Burpee’s catalog of heirloom seeds last winter. You remember last winter with all the snow. Yeah, that one.

As I drooled my way through the catalogs from deep inside my igloo, I read about this plant that produces hundreds of black fruits.

That’s hundreds per plant.

In just a measly 78 days I could be harvesting enough fruit for jams, pies and tarts.

I thought about Huckleberry Finn and Huckleberry Hound and huckleberry pie and decided I, too, should grow this delight that influenced literature, cartoons and cookbooks. I dug out an article a friend of mine had given me that recounted the joy Henry David Thoreau felt when happening across a field of black huckleberries.

Hook, line and sinker fell I.

A huckleberry is a huckleberry, right?

Except when it is masquerading as the garden huckleberry.

I finally did some digging on this plant earlier this month because it was bothering me why the huckleberries I harvested were so – what’s the word I want? Dreadful? Horrible? Icky?

Well, any one of them will do.

I turned to the Internet for a quick search, and the very first thing I read is that the garden huckleberry, or Solanum melanocerasum, is a member of the nightshade family, like a tomato, pepper, eggplant or potato.

Good company, I thought. Then I read about how to grow them, thinking I did what I should have done.

And I get to this part about when the fruit is ripe. And how they are not edible before they are fully ripe. And how they are toxic if they are eaten before they are ripe.

Toxic?

Are green tomatoes toxic? Green peppers aren’t. And what qualifies as unripe in garden huckleberry? A smidge of green? All green? A bit of purple and not all black?

And then this missive of doom from the University of Minnesota says that it takes two weeks after the berries turn black before they are edible. The insides must be purple, not greenish.

It was about at this point that I realized I probably had a jar of toxic pseudo-huckleberry jam – and in such a lovely deep purple hue – on the door of my refrigerator.

Sure, it was inedible from the start. One tiny taste after it cooked had me gagging in the sink. Wishful thinking had it maturing into something delectable as the months passed and no one opened the jar. Many mornings I looked at it and thought about trying some on my toast. But my stomach revolted.

Despite all this alarming information, part of me wanted to give garden huckleberry another chance.

Until I read the message posted on a second Web site. Another of the uninitiated was asking if anyone knew anything at all about garden huckleberry. She was answered by someone who talked about boiling-leaching-soda treatments, lots of sugar and some grape juice for pie or jam and still there remained this “unsettling metallic aftertaste” that might suggest some toxins left over.

Sighing, I went to one more Web site and discovered that there are three major varieties of huckleberries. Garden huckleberry is one kind, the genus Gaylussacia another and the genus Vaccinium the third.

Genus Vaccinium, you see, is best known as the blueberry.

Boy, did I feel silly. First I cook toxic jam and then I don’t even realize that the legendary huckleberry that I really wanted to grow is actually a blueberry. Sure, there are different varieties depending where you are in the United States. And you could get confused because they could be called anything from cranberry to bilberry to whortleberry to blaeberry to huckleberry. But these berries are all edible and nontoxic.

Sometimes, it is best to reap only what you know.

Janine Pineo is a NEWS systems editor whose toxic jam gave drain cleaner a run for its money. Her e-mail is jpineo@bangordailynews.net.