Sloe, sloe, quick, quick, sloe!
12 November 2007
This year has seen a bumper crop of sloe berries – the fruit of the blackthorn (Prunus spinosa). It appears that, for fruit growers everywhere, 2007 was a perfect year for the critical processes of pollination, fruit development and ripening.
Conservation Volunteers’ Tree Nursery has been spending the usual Autumn months out and about collecting fruits from all our native species. Seeds will be extracted from these fruits and grown on to produce future generations of trees and shrubs.
Every site that was visited has produced more sloes than ever before! The warm, dry weather of April helped with the pollination of the flowers, plenty of rain in the summer helped the fruit to swell and a spell of late summer sunshine encouraged them to ripen. The same applied to Autumn berries and apples in all shapes and forms.
The blackthorn, whose wood is used to make the shillelagh, also gives up its fruits to those in search of a famous liqueur – sloe gin. Ordinary gin is infused with the juice of the berries by pricking the berries, steeping them in gin with a little extra sugar added and left for at least three months… delicious!
But, back to the Tree Nursery… the seeds from these berries will spend a short time in a warm, moist environment before being subjected to the cold of the winter. This treatment ensures they break dormancy and germinate in the spring. Learn how to grow them on the Trees of Our Future website – link below.
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| Tree Nursery |
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| Trees of Our Future |