- Author: Mark Bolda
Just thumbing through a mail order catalog from a high end retailer yesterday afternoon for a Valentine's Day gift (don't forget all that this day is also our big annual strawberry production research meeting in Watsonville!) for my one and only, when my eyes lit upon the arresting photo below.
Those blackberries are more than half reverted to red. How is this even possible for a STAGED photograph?
Once I settled down again, it did dawn on me that our blackberry growers and we researchers are a bit ahead of the game in insisting the blackberries we sell to our customers, who aren't necessarily picky about it, be all black, with no blemishes, discoloration or crumbliness.
Perhaps we could describe it as being much as in the same way that Apple does, that we are striving to make things that people don't even know yet they need.
Growers have experimented with shade cloth, shortening pick to clamshell times, shortening time to cooler, changing cooling temperatures, but nothing has proven to be consistently effective with the Prime-Ark 45.
As competition continues to grow against the Prime-Ark 45 & other non proprietary varieties will quality issues be the end of the Prime-Ark/Freedom varieties?
I have a research proposal into NARBA to look at the reversion issue- the hypothesis being that keeping the fruit that goes into the box cool will mitigate to some measure the issue.
Mark