Preserving Local History...In Blackberry Form

There's a park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, that I lived in for ten years which has a park named Anderson Park after the family that sold it to the city in 1971.

It was a plum orchard with a few apples, and the deal was that the city needed to keep the park a wooded area suitable for camping and scout activities.

The plums are great. An old-time prune plum still great for fresh eating and some seedlings that have grown over the last 6 decades which have provided some interesting variation. Those trees aren't going anywhere, anytime soon, but I do intend to pull some scion and root stock out of there since they're proven winners.

But, the real treat from Anderson Park is the blackberry patch that's been on-site since before the Andersons sold the land.

Whatever variety they started with, it's its own thing now, after 60+ years of tip-rooting and self-seeding, and it's an amazing blackberry.

Characteristics:
- Wildly vigorous trailing vines with gnarly thorns
- Massively productive
- Medium sized berries smaller than most ARK and ORUS releases
- Intense, fruity, wild flavor
- Large seeds (only drawback I would say)
- Good for fresh eating, excellent jelly and syrup

See, it used to dominate a 10' tall chainlink along at least 150' of the park boundary, and towered up to 20' tall and was probably 50' wide as well, a true monster patch.

Now, the fence is gone and what's left is a 30' x 20' patch sprawling on the ground and probably accidentally there after a failure to eradicate out of a wetland area to make way for some residential development and access where there used to be an alfalfa field and the fence.

I always intended on coming to dig some plants up to add to my system, because I love the berries and because it's a true, locally adapted cultivar which can handle Utah's alkaline soils, extreme temperature variation, and drought-stricken summers with no disease. That's genetic stock worth saving.

So, I went and dug some up this weekend, just to make sure I didn't lose my opportunity. It's not the ideal time to do this, so hopefully the plants will be alright, but I felt the need to move pressing on me.

I'll post some pictures below.

Here are the photos:

They're undeniably vigorous. What a wonderful plant.

They've all sent new buds, some faster than others, even the one I thought I killed. One of them is just bursting with vitality. It makes me smile.

Impressive resilience.

I'll be greatly pleased to add these to my project area, and one in my yarden as well.

I'll share with you when I plant these out once things consistently cool off.

I'm bigly excited about the additions to my project area this fall.

Those old park plums are exactly the kind of thing that disappears without anyone noticing. Six decades of seedling variation from the original orchard is worth something. Be curious what the fruit is like once they settle in and start producing properly.

Joao Winckler wrote:Those old park plums are exactly the kind of thing that disappears without anyone noticing. Six decades of seedling variation from the original orchard is worth something. Be curious what the fruit is like once they settle in and start producing properly.

When my family lived a mile away from the park, we'd head up there with 1-gallon bags and 5-gallon buckets in the late summer. We'd fill the bags up with blackberries and fill the 5-gallon buckets with plums. By the end of our trip, I'd be purple fingered, sticky faced, and smiling ear to ear at the free bounty I was able to harvest. That had a large influence on my desire to create a food forest.

The blackberries will be popping for me next year, so we'll see how they respond to their new home.

The plums will have to wait until next year, because I've bitten off about as much as I can chew for fall projects already (as always, as I'm sure you can relate).