Delicious berries and mini kiwi fruits
Are your fruit crops running out already? Start planning for next year’s harvest with this unusual selection of autumn fruits from Lubera. Blackberry Direttissima Montblanc crops from August to October. It has its first ripe fruit in mid-August, with the peak harvest in early to mid-October. In contrast to the first autumn blackberry varieties, it lets the majority of its fruit mature.
There’s a great selection of Lubera-bred raspberries, such as Autumn First and Autumn Best, which are ready for harvest from the end of August right through September. Autumn Best continues to fruit during October. Raspberry Twotimer Sugana’s one-year-old canes start yielding the first fruits around mid-August and last well into October. See more here on Climbing Fruit.
Autumn fruits – Pointilla, or dotberry
The Pointilla, the dotberry, is simply called “autumn berry” in some regions of the United States – it ripens when almost nothing else matures, in October and November. The colour of the shrub changes to yellow or bright red at the beginning of September (depending on which variety you have). Don’t be tempted to harvest them early, as they can be bitter – try them twice a week until the sugar releases into the berries.
I can highly recommend these plants, as I have two, Sweet n’ Sour (red) and Fortunella (yellow), but you need to have a pollinator – you can buy them at a reduced rate in pairs.
Grape kiwis with edible skins
Here’s a novelty – mini kiwis to harvest from September to October. The skins are hairless and edible, hence the name Grape Kiwis. The Geneva Kiwi’s skin tastes like honey, while Ken’s Red has red-violet skin and flesh, with a sweet and aromatic flavour.
Vitikiwi has small, elongated, berry-sized fruits, mostly seedless, which taste sweet and aromatic. Grape Kiwi is the Lubera trademark name for Actinidia arguta and Actinidia arguta x actinidia kolomicta hybrids.
For more information on the above plants, visit www.lubera.co.uk.
PLEASE NOTE: Lubera no longer sells plants to the UK after Brexit. It is working on a solution to deliver directly to customers’ homes in the future.
