Say Hello To This New Late-Season Blackberry
The Arkansas Fruit Breeding Program has released a new late-season blackberry (‘Sweet-Ark Immaculate’) to give growers a premium product after other varieties are done yielding.
Commercial scale propagators have licenses and material for sale for the 2024 planting season.
Sweet-Ark® Immaculate™ is a thornless, floricane-fruiting blackberry that offers medium to large berries that have been shown to hold up well after harvest. Floricane varieties produce flowers and fruit on second-year canes.
“It is named to highlight its berry quality, which is beyond reproach, and its late-ripening season,” says Margaret Worthington, Director of the Fruit Breeding Program for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station. “People have been asking about a new late-season variety from the Arkansas program for a long time now. The main advantages Sweet-Ark Immaculate has over other late-season blackberry varieties are its outstanding post-harvest performance and its great yield potential.”
Worthington says ‘Sweet-Ark Immaculate’ demonstrates a step forward for blackberry firmness, which aids in holding up well during storage and shipping. Postharvest trials at the Fruit Research Station near Clarksville show that ‘Sweet-Ark Immaculate’ had better fruit firmness than all comparison cultivars after two weeks of refrigerated storage.
Maintaining quality in postharvest storage is especially challenging late in the season, Worthington adds, because it is when temperatures are high and spotted wing drosophila pest pressure increases.
Despite its late-ripening window, red drupelet reversion and leak ratings for ‘Sweet-Ark Immaculate’ were similar to earlier season varieties like ‘Sweet-Ark Caddo’ and ‘Sweet-Ark Ponca‘, she notes. Red drupelet reversion occurs when the individual round segments on the blackberry turn from black back to red during or after post-harvest storage.
For more, continue reading at uaex.uada.edu.
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