The Trehane Blueberry PYO
About the Bluebs & Us!
The Story so far…
The Trehane Blueberry PYO has been around a long time… longer than any of us here today…
The story began in 1951 when David Trehane Senior answered an advert in the Times offering anyone in post-war Britain 100x high-bush variety Blueberry saplings free of charge if they paid the shipping costs. The saplings came from Lulu Island (British Columbia, Canada) where high-bush blueberries were grown commercially whilst over here only smaller bilberry style blueberries were found growing on the moors.
The first batch arrived in and thrived on our sandy acidic Dorset soil and so in 1964 David went all in and planted over 2,000 here on this plot here just down the road from his house.
Over the next 60 years many hands have looked after this land and nurtured these plants, and after the Trehane family retired it was taken on by two Dorset brothers who set about to try and revitalise this hallowed Blueberry growing land.
About the Bluebs
There were 7 original varieties of high-bush Blueberry planted here.
Some varieties are still found all around the world, wheras some of which are just not found grown commercially anymore. This isn’t because they don’t taste great (quite the contrary actually), its just that they don’t crop as well as the newer varieties of Blueberry out there these days.
The varieties were chosen to try and achieve as long a season as possible, some early ones, mid-season and later fruiting ones. The varieties we have are listed below in a rough of order from sweet to punchy in flavour.
Berkeley / Bluecrop / Earliblue / Collins / Blueray / Herbert / Ivanhoe
In 2022 we also replaced some rows of a struggling variety called Coville with a newer later fruiting variety called Aurora. Truth be told, 4 years on they aren’t doing as well as we’d like - We’re not entirely sure why but the conclusion is to keep trying nonetheless & we’re hoping to develop the back half of ‘Tunnel 5’ in the years ahead with some new varieties to test how they do….
And as for how long our old plants will go on for - we don’t know! We do know though that they are setting the standard and as such we will continue to look after them as best we can in the current challenges of climate change and organic farming in general :)
Josh / Jeremy / Dan in 2022
Stuart mid-pruning 2026
More About Us
So between the plantation being planted and 2015, it was run by different members of the Trehane family.
However, it was Josh Benson, the first non-Trehane and the ‘Blueberry Brother’ of Brothers Farm that that took on the plantation and began to learn everything needed to look after the plantation from Jeremy Trehane, (David Seniors son). He kept the field alive and had a vision that the site could be more than just a fruit field - despite the neighbouring Nursery in disrepair and the infrastructure on site showing severe signs of decay.
He looked after the Blueberries for 3 years, doing everything on his own and developing and building the reputation of the PYO.
In 2018 Josh’s brother Dan (The Flower Brother) moved back to Dorset with his family and they teamed up and spent the next 7 years constantly working hard on developing the business together.
The plan was to diversify their produce through growing Cut-Flowers on another part of the site whilst renting a coffee machine in the shed to accompany the PYO and help bring customers in.
The main objective has always been to create a more reliable and sustainable income from the site that wasn’t so reliant on a volatile Blueberry crop - not that dissimilar a challenge to the majority of farms in this day & age - diversifying our income whilst improving the land and biodiversity at the same time was and still is the plan.
The Cut-Flowers grew steadily over the years and as a crop they have certainly done the job of stretching out a 6 week Blueberry season into an 8 month fresh cut-flower season - & now with the addition of our dried flower range, this carries right the way through the year.
The big change for us was in 2024 when we played all our cards and refurbished the old Nursery Potting Barn into the new Flower Barn Workshop Cafe. It’s year round presence, run by a fantastic new team now operate a banging cafe alongside floristry workshops and events held throughout the year and of course become the perfect accompaniment to a busy Blueberry PYO season.
A couple of years later after the Flower Barn was created, and ten years since he started looking after the Blueberries, Josh has now moved onto other things and so our new main man Stuart has taken over the stewardship of looking after the oldest blueberry plantation in the country!
It’s an ongoing challenge for sure but we’re still in the game and always trying our best to develop the site into somewhere beautiful, productive, vibrant & diverse.
And if you’re interested in the Brothers Farm side of things then click the button below for all the info! :)