Berry
A berry is a small, pulpy, and often edible fruit. Typically, berries are juicy, rounded, brightly colored, sweet, sour or tart, and do not have a stone or pit although many pips or seeds may be present. Common examples of berries in the culinary sense are strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, white currants, blackcurrants, and redcurrants. In Britain, soft fruit is a horticultural term for such fruits.
The common usage of the term "berry" is different from the scientific or botanical definition of a berry, which refers to a fleshy fruit produced from the ovary of a single flower where the outer layer of the ovary wall develops into an edible fleshy portion. The botanical definition includes many fruits that are not commonly known or referred to as berries, such as grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, bananas, and chili peppers. Fruits commonly considered berries but excluded by the botanical definition include strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, which are aggregate fruits, and mulberries, which are multiple fruits. Watermelons and pumpkins are giant berries that fall into the category "pepos". A plant bearing berries is said to be or.
Berries are eaten worldwide and often used in jams, preserves, cakes, or pies. Some berries are commercially important. The berry industry varies from country to country as do types of berries cultivated or growing in the wild. Some berries such as raspberries and strawberries have been bred for hundreds of years and are distinct from their wild counterparts, while other berries, such as lingonberries and cloudberries, grow almost exclusively in the wild.
While many berries are edible, some are poisonous to humans, such as those of deadly nightshade and pokeweed. Others, such as the white mulberry, red mulberry, and elderberry, are poisonous when unripe, but are edible when ripe.
History
Berries have been valuable as a food source for humans since before the start of agriculture, and remain a food source for other primates. They were a seasonal staple for early hunter-gatherers for thousands of years, and wild berry gathering remains a popular activity in Europe and North America today. In time, humans learned to store berries so that they could be used in the winter. They may be made into fruit preserves, and among Native Americans, mixed with meat and fats as pemmican.Berries also began to be cultivated in Europe and other countries. Some species of blackberries and raspberries of the genus Rubus have been cultivated since the 17thcentury, while smooth-skinned blueberries and cranberries of the genus Vaccinium have been cultivated in the United States for over a century. In Japan, between the 10th and 18thcenturies, the terms and wikt:ichigo#Japanese| referred to many berry crops. The most widely cultivated berry of modern times is the strawberry, which is produced globally at twice the amount of all other berry crops combined.
The strawberry was mentioned by ancient Romans, who thought it had medicinal properties, but it was then not a staple of agriculture. Woodland strawberries began to be grown in French gardens in the 14thcentury. The musk strawberry, also known as the hautbois strawberry, began to be grown in European gardens in the late 16thcentury. Later, the Virginia strawberry was grown in Europe and the United States. The most commonly consumed strawberry, the garden strawberry, is an accidental hybrid of the Virginia strawberry and a Chilean variety Fragaria chiloensis. It was first noted by a French gardener around the mid 18thcentury that, when F. moschata and F. virginiana were planted in between rows of F. chiloensis, the Chilean strawberry would bear abundant and unusually large fruits. Soon after, began to study the breeding of strawberries and made several discoveries crucial to the science of plant breeding, such as the sexual reproduction of strawberry. Later, in the early 1800s, English breeders of strawberry made varieties of F. ananassa which were important in strawberry breeding in Europe, and hundreds of cultivars have since been produced through the breeding of strawberries.
Etymology
The Old English word comes from Proto-Germanic, variously reconstructed as,, basjom, which is of unknown origin. This and "apple" are the only fruit names in modern English which are descended from "native" Germanic words.Botanical definition
In botanical terminology, a berry is a simple fruit with seeds and pulp produced from the ovary of a single flower. It is fleshy throughout, except for the seeds. It does not have a special "line of weakness" along which it splits to release the seeds when ripe. A berry may develop from an ovary with one or more carpels. The seeds are usually embedded in the fleshy interior of the ovary, but there are some non-fleshy examples such as peppers, with air rather than pulp around their seeds. The differences between the everyday and botanical uses of "berry" result in three categories: those fruits that are berries under both definitions; those fruits that are botanical berries but not commonly known as berries; and those parts of plants commonly known as berries that are not botanical berries, and may not even be fruits.Berries under both definitions include blueberries, cranberries, lingonberries, and the fruits of many other members of the heather family, as well as gooseberries, goji berries and elderberries. The fruits of some "currants", such as blackcurrants, red currants and white currants, are botanical berries, and are treated as horticultural berries, even though their most commonly used names do not include the word "berry".
Botanical berries not commonly known as berries include bananas, tomatoes, grapes, eggplants, persimmons, watermelons, and pumpkins.
There are several different kinds of fruits which are commonly called berries, but are not botanical berries. Blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries are kinds of aggregate fruit; they contain seeds from different ovaries of a single flower. In aggregate fruits like blackberries, the individual "fruitlets" making up the fruit can be clearly seen. The fruits of blackthorn may be called "sloe berries", but botanically are small stone fruits or drupes, like plums or apricots.
Junipers and yews are commonly said to have berries, but these plants do not produce botanical fruits at all: they are gymnosperms, specifically conifers, not angiosperms. Their "berries" are highly-modified seed-bearing cones. In juniper berries, used to flavour gin, the cone scales, which are hard and woody in most conifers, are instead soft and fleshy when ripe. The bright red berries of yews consist of a fleshy outgrowth almost enclosing the poisonous seed. The resemblance of these plant structures to botanical berries provides a striking example of convergent evolution in different plant clades.
Cultivation
have been grown in gardens in Europe since the 14thcentury. Blueberries were domesticated starting in 1911, with the first commercial crop in 1916. Huckleberries of all varieties are not fully domesticated, but domestication was attempted from 1994 to 2010 for the economically significant western huckleberry. Many other varieties of Vaccinium are likewise not domesticated, with some being of commercial importance.File:Ostružiník moruška ve Finsku.jpg|thumb|Cloudberry, common flowering plant in the cool temperate regions, alpine and arctic tundra and boreal forest.
Agricultural methods
Like most other food crops, berries are commercially grown, with both conventional pest management and integrated pest management practices. Organically certified berries are becoming more widely available.:5Many soft fruit berries require a period of temperatures between for breaking dormancy. In general, strawberries require 200–300hours, blueberries 650–850hours, blackberries 700hours, raspberries 800–1700hours, currants and gooseberries 800–1500hours, and cranberries 2000hours. However, too low a temperature will kill the crops: blueberries do not tolerate temperatures below, raspberries, depending on variety, may tolerate as low as, and blackberries are injured below. Spring frosts are, however, much more damaging to berry crops than low winter temperatures. Sites with moderate slopes, facing north or east in the Northern Hemisphere, near large bodies of water, which regulate spring temperature, are considered ideal in preventing spring frost injury to the new leaves and flowers. All berry crops have shallow root systems. Many US land-grant university extension offices suggest that strawberries should not be planted more than five years on the same site, due to the danger of black root rot, which in the past has been controlled in major commercial production by annual methyl bromide fumigation but which is largely prohibited now. Besides the number of years in production, soil compaction, the frequency of fumigation, and herbicide usages increase the appearance of black root rot in strawberries. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and many other berries are susceptible to verticillium wilt. Blueberries and cranberries grow poorly if the clay or silt content of the soil is more than 20%, while most other berries tolerate a wide range of soil types. For most berry crops, the ideal soil is well drained sandy loam, with a pH of 6.2–6.8 and a moderate to high organic content; however, blueberries have an ideal pH of 4.2–4.8 and can be grown on muck soils, while blueberries and cranberries prefer poorer soils with lower cation exchange, lower calcium, and lower levels of phosphorus.
Growing most berries organically requires the use of proper crop rotation, the right mix of cover crops, and the cultivation of the correct beneficial microorganisms in the soil. As blueberries and cranberries thrive in soils that are not hospitable to most other plants, and conventional fertilizers are toxic to them, the primary concern when growing them organically is bird management.
Postharvest small fruit berries are generally stored at relative humidity and. Cranberries, however, are frost sensitive, and should be stored at. Blueberries are the only berries that respond to ethylene, but flavor does not improve after harvest, so they require the same treatment as other berries. Removal of ethylene may reduce disease and spoilage in all berries. Precooling within one to two hours post-harvest to storage temperature, generally, via forced air cooling increases the storage life of berries by about a third. Under optimum storage conditions, raspberries and blackberries last for two to five days, strawberries 7–10days, blueberries two to four weeks, and cranberries two to four months. Berries can be shipped under high carbon dioxide or modified atmosphere of carbon dioxide for high carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide and oxygen for a modified atmosphere container to increase shelf life and prevent grey mold rot.