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The sweet taste of December The lazy, hazy, crazy days of a Nelson summer wouldn’t be the same without a country excursion to pick berries, but you’d better be quick. Dwindling numbers of growers now offer the chance to pick-your-own, Tracy Neal reports.
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eat, dust, queues of people with cartons, berries and a real-fruit ice cream from a vendor on the Waimea Plains: It’s Christmas berry time. The traditional summer activity has long been a popular pastime in this fruit bowl of a region, but changing times have meant fewer choices for the public to head out and pick their own berries, and sample one, two or maybe three or four while filling the carton. Steve Myers is what you might call a boutique berry grower, producing a fruit salad of sweet berries on his farmlet, Fairfield Gardens, a couple of kilometres south of Wakefield. The small forest of strawberries, raspberries, boysenberries and blueberries takes up just over four hectares of the 11-hectare property. It’s the last fruit stop for travellers heading south to the West Coast or Christchurch, and it seems that Fairfield berries have quite the reputation. “Everyone who comes in – and we get people from all over the country, tells us we have the best-flavoured berries in the country. Maybe that’s just because they’ve never tasted proper berries before.” Steve has been growing berries for about 40 years, simply because he loves being able to amble through the rows of ripe fruit on a summer day, sampling as he goes. “I just love eating fruit. My wife calls me a ‘fruitaholic’. The berry season is the healthiest time of my life because I spend my whole day wandering around grazing, finding the best ones and thinking, ‘I must cultivate these ones’.”
Steve is such a connoisseur of berries; he’s even created his own cultivars from selected berry bushes which provided the most intense flavoured berries. He has gradually, over the past 40 years, developed fruit he says is better eating, and better suited to being packed in a punnet. The farmlet used to supply Nelson Raspberry Marketing, but now relies mostly on gate sales and supplying two local outlets. Raspberries have been grown in New Zealand since early European settlement. Records show that in the early 1900s more than 100 of the nation’s growers were in and around Nelson. The global Depression of the 1930s saw production decline until it picked up pace again and recovered enough by 1970, when a virus, accidentally introduced with an imported cultivar, wiped out many vines. Growers persevered, and by the 1980s raspberries ranked among New Zealand’s top five fresh exports, until a raspberry bud moth hit, and the bottom fell out of the export market to Australia. These days, New Zealand imports raspberries to help meet domestic demand. Steve says he did once try a pick-your-own option at Fairfield Gardens, but only a couple of people turned up. “It’s probably because of where we are. People like to just pop in and buy them. Having said that, pick-your-own might work now because Wakefield has grown so much.” But that would mean Steve, who also works as a builder, in the months waiting for the berries to ripen, would have to expand production.
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