Wet British summer causes shortage in sloe berries

by amyjudd | October 14, 2008 at 01:11 pm

1592 views | 5 Recommendations | 15 comments

Looking to make some sloe gin this year? Well you may be out of luck as sloe berries are getting really hard to find.

The wet British summer has damaged the crop extensively, so making the popular alcoholic drink will be difficult.

Sloe berries are the last fresh fruit you can pick before the winter sets in.

Ray Townsend, arboretum manager at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, said it could be the cool spring and wet summer that meant the fruit did not flourish and ripen. He said fruit trees need mild weather to allow insects to pollinate, buds to burst and finally for the fruit to ripen.

"A number of crops, fruits and berries have suffered because it has not been a good year," he said.

The damson and plum harvest this year was poor and gardeners are reporting a shortage in tomatoes because of a lack of sunshine. However it has been a bumper year for mushroom and other fungi which flourish in wet weather.

Graeme Proctor, from Crown Nursery in Suffolk, said the weather had not been good for sloes for the last two summers.

He said: "Because last year's summer was very bad, it meant the fruit bud initiation on which this year's crop would grow was very poor. This led to fewer flower buds this spring.

"When they did flower the weather was very hot, in the 70s, followed by snow for a couple of weeks in April, which killed them off. If the fruit can't set it simply withers and drop off. "

He blamed climate change for the bad weather. He added: "For that reason [climate change], it's been a bad year for all stone fruit including plums. It's all down to global warming."

This, on top of the financial crisis, may make it an even worse British Christmas.

0 See all footage | View Slideshow

Share: email story | add to any | | facebook | stumbleupon

recommend This comment thread is now closed

Yersinia pestis (not verified)

at 13:56 on October 14th, 2008

Last year was great for sloes in my local London park. I picked about a kilo was hardly any effort. This year, there are virtually none. 2006 was a very bad year here, too.

Red Snapper9

at 14:02 on October 14th, 2008

No sign of any sloes this year due to the early frost which damaged the flowers. I'm making blackberrry vodka instead and will have to wait for next year and hopefully a good crop of sloes for my sloe gin

Red Snapper9 has contributed a photo to this story.

Jay_PH

at 14:38 on October 14th, 2008

Hardly any in my usual spot in liverpool and I hear it's been very bad all over the country. Check the forum out here www.sloe.biz

Barbara McPherson

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:58 on October 14th, 2008

amyjudd, I like this story. It's good stuff. How are we going to make our gin and tonics then? Oh, the privation.

CanLaddie

at 15:53 on October 14th, 2008

Here in Ontario in central Canada, we’ve had a very wet summer as well, but our chokecherries (Prunus virginiana, the closest thing we have to sloes) were marvellous. I’ve never seen such profusion of such relatively sweet and large (and non-astringent) chokecherries in forty years of botanizing. I made quite marvellous chokecherry gin. And there’s still some left ...

Hythe Eye

at 00:56 on October 15th, 2008

This picture was taken 2007, when sloe berries were plentiful. We made a few bottles of sloe gin to share with our family and friends. This year though we have had great trouble finding any sloes here in the New Forest, Hampshire, UK area - but I must say we found a few on about four bushes and have some sloe gin fermenting for Christmas 2008!

Hythe Eye has contributed a photo to this story.

Dinnovation

at 00:50 on October 15th, 2008

Most of my sloes last year came from around the car park at my workplace, this year there are none, I thought hedge cutting may have been the reason, but obviously not. I do have a few in the freezer still, so may get one bottle :-)

divedart

at 04:51 on October 15th, 2008

Like previous replys I had no problem finding sloes last year - In our part of suffolk we had a bumper harvest! Its not been so good this year presumably due to the late snow. I'm not sure that the writrer can definately blame global warming - througout history there has always been good and bad years for harvests of all kinds.

paulwhite53

at 05:25 on October 15th, 2008

I picked these ripe sloes in early september. some of my favourite bushes had hardly any whilst others seemed about normal.

paulwhite53 has contributed a photo to this story.

Jolyon Leonard

at 03:22 on October 16th, 2008

Here's the abundance of sloes I found last year, and duly made up a good 2 litre batch of sloe gin. I had been looking forward to getting a similar yield this year.

Jolyon Leonard has contributed a photo to this story.

Rick Kelsall (not verified)

at 01:57 on November 8th, 2008

"Here's the abundance of sloes I found last year, and duly made up a good 2 litre batch of sloe gin"

So how is life in River Cottage?

Linbogle (not verified)

at 06:43 on October 16th, 2008

When I read this news a couple of days ago, I was planning on going sloe-picking for next year's 'vintage' (I always leave the sloe gin at least a year to 'ripen', as it seems to improve with age).

All we could see was a handful of sloes, spread out over a large group of shrubs where last year we got three kilos with no effort at all. However, an important factor may be the timing: last year I took the photo of the large crop on September 7th, and now we are more than five weeks on. October is late, as I have discovered previously, so by now the sloes have probably fallen, or been eaten by birds. Our summer wasn't as wet as last year's, but it has been an exceptionally poor year for plums in general - our plum tree, usually loaded down with plums, yielded nothing this year - so logically, that would also apply to 'prunus spinosa'.

I was interested to read Barbara McPherson's remark about 'gin and tonics'. I only know of sloe gin as a liqueur, which we make with jenever here in Holland. Are there more of you who make a long drink with it?

afterforty

at 13:48 on October 16th, 2008

As the Telegraph newspaper article says, the failure of this year's sloe crop is a consequence of the UK's poor weather in summer 2007, just as the excellent crop of 2007 was a consequence of the good summer of 2006. The blackthorn trees simple did not produce many flowers this year, and sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn.

None of this though is a consequence of "climate change", it is just the normal short-term year by year weather variation. Climate change is occurring, but it's not to blame for this year's shortage of sloes.