California Boysenberry a smashing success!

The Boysenberry is a specialty fruit limited due to its short growing season and quick berry ripening. Considered a trailing blackberry (as opposed to an erect blackberry,)  is a large bramble berry similar to the blackberry.

In Buena Park, California the Boysenberry Festival at Knott's Berry Farm celebrates this delightful, tasty berry's heritage which began on the very land where the festival is held!

Rubus ursinus var loganobaccus or Boysenberry, is a hybrid aggregate fruit that was cultivated by cross pollinating the flowers of three berries: raspberry, loganberry and the blackberry. Swedish immigrant Charles Rudolph Boysen (1895-1950) experimented to create the new strain of berry-- but the plants kept dying on the vine, first in Napa Valley in 1923, and later in Anaheim where Boysen brought his plants with him. He became Anaheim Parks Superintendent and still was unable to make his new berry a commercial success, thus abandoning his ambitions of growing a commercial crop.

Years later successful berry grower Walter Knott tracked down Boysen, and tried his hand at growing a few dying vines at his farm, now known as Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park. Walter Knott nurtured scraggly plants to health and named the new berry after his friend.

It is estimated that in the 1950s the boysenberry crop in California reached its peak with approx. 2,400 acres planted. Today boysenberries are a limited production, specialty crop found on the West Coast, growing exceptionally well in California's Central Valley and Coast, the U.S. Northwest and Southern California where the fruit initially took off as a marketable product. Northern New Zealand is the #1 grower and exporter of boysenberries world-wide.

Oval shaped, bold in size and colored in onyx and ruby hues, it tastes similar to a loganberry with its fruit produced directly from the plant's flowers.

Yield maturity is reached in the fourth year.  Boysenberries have a short harvest in California, typically between mid-June and early July. Hand harvesting only during the morning hours of the day (the berries become soft in the afternoon heat,) picking crews fill small crates with approximately 6.5 pounds of berries for fresh market and 14 pounds of berries for processing. The berries are shipped to the market or processor the same day, as shelf-life is less than two days.

The finicky boysenberry bush cannot tolerate soil that freezes. The berry's soft, thin skin easily leaks juice and decays quickly. At  farmers market look for darker berries (the reddish berries are overly tart.) Use them right away after purchase for pies, jams, jellies and delicious dessert recipes.

Boysenberries have enemies such as red berry mites, raspberry horntail, cutworm, whitefly and aphids. Diseases that can affect boysenberry productivity are , powdery mildew, septoria cane and leaf spot, cane dieback, botrytis, yellow rust, dry berry disease, verticillium wilt and crown gall. Methyl bromide soil fumigation prior to planting may keep verticillium wilt and crown gall under control.

Boysenberries are sweet and work well in recipes with creams,  trifles and fruit tarts. They have been paired with apricots, peaches, honey, rose, citrus, coconut, strawberries, raisins, hazelnut, mascarpone,  chicken, pork, chocolate, fino sherry, rum and young cheeses.