Allotment blackberries

We have a thornless blackberry. Let me tell you, if you’re going to transplant blackberry plants, it’s always worth paying extra for a tasty thornless variety, because transplanting thorned blackberries is painful.

Okay, basic lesson in soft fruit here, which I didn’t know until last week, so I hope it will fascinate you as much as it did me. You can tell if a plant is a raspberry or a blackberry by checking if the core stays in the ripe fruit or is left on the plant when the fruit is picked. Berries with the core intact are blackberries and berries that lose the core are raspberries.

I can hear you scoffing already at the woman who can’t tell a raspberry from a blackberry but bear with me. What’s a loganberry then, clever-clogs? Or a tayberry? See … it is a useful thing to know. In fact both berries are classed as blackberry/raspberry crosses: the loganberry keeps its core intact and is therefore classified as a blackberry. Confusingly, the tayberry has a core that sometimes stays with the fruit and sometimes comes free of it, and is classed as a hybrid.

Now, to the issue of pruning and transplanting. When any of the four berries above have flowered and fruited, any cane that bore fruit dies back to the crown. This means, when prune, you are simply working to make space for the primary buds just below the soil line to grow and bear fruit. Everything above those buds is cane that the previous summer and is now two years old but will still try to produce fruit at the expense of the new canes that have grown from soil level.

So quite obviously, transplants need to be cut back hard, to get good growth. In addition, any transplant will suffer stress – think about how stressful it is for you to move, and then think about the plant – same process! So cutting back allows the plant not to put all its strength into old grown so it can concentrate on settling in and producing new growth that will be adjusted to its new conditions and that new growth should appear within 4-6 weeks.

We moved this blackberry a week or so ago, but because we didn’t have its blue screen in place I didn’t cut it hard back, or we wouldn’t have known where it was when it came to siting the screen for it to grow up. Now the screen has been fixed to the fence, I shall prune the blackberry back (taking care not to cut so far that the parent, thorny, plant is live above the graft) and watch it take off in spring).

Labels: allotment-blackberries, allotment-december, allotment-transplanting-fruit

Allotment crops – freezer to plate

This is a really wonderful cake (or pudding) which I make for the winter days when we’ve been out on the allotments and we’re frozen and starved when we get home. It’s very easy, very substantial and has the taste of summer. It’s good enough to serve for a dinner party pudding, and robust enough to hand slices to any horny handed son of the soil who normally turns up his nose at ‘fancy’ food – and I find there are quite a few of that type, in allotmentland! It uses blackberries from the freezer, which we harvest off our plot (thornless, sweet and very large) and mix with wild brambles (thorny, small and tart) to get the perfect combination of juicy sweetness and tangy flavour. It's also very easy.

Cake
120g butter or margarine
120g sugar
2 large eggs
120g plain flour
200g blackberries

Rumble (it should be called crumble, but the boy called it rumble when he was a toddler and it’s been rumble in our house ever since)
60g butter or margarine
50g plain flour
100g sugar
50g oats

Preheat oven to 18ºC/gas 4. Grease and bottom line a 500g loaf tin, using greaseproof paper which rises up the narrow sides over the top (this allows you to lift your cake out at the end of cooking without disturbing the topping)

Place the fat in a mixing bowl. Add sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating in well with each addition. Fold in flour. Spoon the mixture into the loaf tin, spreading to the edges. Top with the blackberries. Place the remaining flour in a bowl. Add the remaining fat and rub until the absorbed and the mixture resembles crumbs. Mix in the sugar and oats to end up with a fairly loose dry mixture

Sprinkle this mixture over the blackberries, spreading it out evenly but not pressing it down

Bake for 45-50 minutes until golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly before turning out. Great hot or cold, or with yoghurt for breakfast or warmed slightly with a cup of tea when you come in from a day’s heavy digging.

Labels: allotment-blackberries, allotment-cooking, allotment-crops, allotment-freezer