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Blackberries
VARIETIES
CHESTER: One of the many excellent large-fruited thornless American varieties, Chester originated in Illinois, and bears heavy crops from August until autumn.
LOCH NESS: Introduced by the Scottish Crop Research Institute, Loch Ness is probably the most widely grown British blackberry, thanks to a combination of qualities: its stems are thornless, and it produces masses of large, well flavoured fruit from June onwards.
DRISOLLS CARMEL: Superb tasting mid to late season variety. Carmel is sufficiently sweet to deliver consumers a true ‘dessert’ berry that can be eaten straight from the punnet.
KARAKA BLACK: A large sweet tasting mid season variety bred in New Zealand. Picking commences in early July and extends for eight or nine weeks until early September.
HISTORY
Collecting blackberries from autumn hedgerows is an ancient custom, and dates back to the earliest days when most soft fruit – strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries among them – were collected from the wild rather than cultivated in the garden. In fact it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that the first cultivated blackberries were developed. Partly this was to do with the fact that wild blackberries tend to be larger and sweeter than other wild fruit anyway, but it was also because blackberries – with their vicious thorns and phenomenal rates of growth – were (and in many places still are) regarded as incorrigibly invasive weeds. Most early references to them in horticultural journals detailed methods of eradicating blackberries rather than ways of cultivating them.
This prejudice against blackberries, though, was finally overcome by pioneering gardeners and farmers in the United States, who started experimenting with wild American species in the 1830s. By the 1860s British fruit catalogues were listing several cultivated varieties to choose from, all of them American in origin. Though British growers introduced one or two varieties of their own, the United States continued to lead the way, and it was the legendary American nurseryman Luther Burbank who, in 1893, introduced the most famous variety of all, the Himalaya Giant, which can still be found today. It was in the States, too, that Judge JH Logan crossed blackberries with raspberries to produce the loganberry, which combines the best qualities of both fruits. In more recent years, the Scottish Horticultural Research Institute has introduced a number of useful new varieties with few or no thorns and increased disease resistance.
The British blackberry season begins in June; several varieties will continue producing fruit until the first frosts in November. From October to May blackberries are imported from Mexico.
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