It was a hot, sticky, messy day yesterday. It was quite honestly, a day when I should have relaxed. It was tempting, the thought of lounging on my recliner, in the same room as my portable air conditioner, while it did the work.
But it was not to be. Outside, there was one bush, offering up its glossy blackberries to me. The last pick of the season. I couldn’t resist. And it was early morning, with the sun not yet risen. Perfect. |
Of course, you can get cultivated thornless blackberries too, but they need a huge lot of tended real estate, which a lot of us don’t have these days. But they’re not related to the black currant.
Black currants are brimming over with good nutrients. In WW2 they became very important as a source of Vitamin C in Europe and the UK. With citrus fruit blockaded, blackcurrants became tremendously important and were (still are) used to prevent scurvy.
The journal HortTechnology reminds us that in the late 1800s there were around 7,400 acres of Ribes species (black, white and red currants, plus gooseberries) grown in the United States.
This all came to a crashing end when it was discovered that black currants could host blister fungus, a disease that attacks white pines. White pines were a huge source of revenue for the government, and the logging industry prevailed to get rid of all the black currants in the USA. So all bushes were destroyed.
Since then "So the discovery of a few small pine trees infected with blister rust was to trigger a gigantic fight that has been waged coast to coast for 70 years," Benedict from Business Insider wrote.
Blackcurrant cultivation in the US was restricted in 1911, followed one year later by a ban on the importation of white pine seedlings from Europe.
In 2003 the ban was finally overturned. Blackcurrants are much more resistant to diseases these days. States control their own crop growth. Slowly some growers are developing blackcurrant farming again, notably in the New York area.
Blackcurrants are easy to grow. Not so easy to market to folks who’ve never had the eating experience of them! As an example, Skittles candies have to taste like grapes, as USA folks don’t know how blackcurrants taste! So you’ll only find purple blackcurrant flavours in Europe and Australia.
Delay: but okay!
You can use that in so many things, but the word for it is “yum!”
Thanks for letting me ramble on about this! Now a break until next year!
Sometimes, instead of smelling the roses, I linger to marvel at the engineering and precision of this triumph of nature.