A Funny Thing

You know something, I am pretty set in my ways, things I like to watch, eat and how I like things done. I do love to learn new things though and I love to find out interesting histories of things. One of the new things I enjoy doing is going to Trader Joes. A quaint little market that I have never set foot in until recently. If you are not familiar with a Trader Joes, the best way for me to describe it, is a General Store for international foods and organic foods. My son loves the cereal bars. They are organic and good for you and just a $1.69 a box. They don't have the garbage as the cereal bars might have at a regular grocery store. Another thing is I love strawberry, peach, or apricot jams on my toast. I never have really gotten into other berry flavors or grapes. Well a funny thing happened I had my english muffins(from Trader Joes) for breakfast last week and was out of my strawberry jam and found a co-workers Boysenberry jam in the the fridge and asked her if I could use some, of course she said yes. I was a little leery so only had a little bit of it. I loved it, it is so good. So the curious person I am wanted to know something about Boysenberry and this is what I found.
Courtesy of Wikipedia.com

It was first cultivated on Rudolph Boysen's farm in northern California. Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate it in southern California.[4] His family's small restaurant and pie business eventually grew into Knott's Berry Farm.
In the late 1920s, George M. Darrow of the USDA began tracking down reports it had encountered of a large, reddish-purple berry that had been grown on a farm by a man named Rudolph Boysen.[4] He enlisted the help of Walter Knott, a Southern California farmer who was known as a berry expert. Knott hadn't heard of the new berry, but he agreed to help Darrow in his search for the berry.

Knott's Berry Farm

Darrow and Knott learned soon after that Rudolph Boysen had abandoned his growing experiments several years earlier and sold his farm. Undaunted by this news, Darrow and Knott headed out to Boysen's old farm, on which they found several frail vines surviving in a field choked with weeds. They transplanted the vines to Knott's farm where he nurtured them back to fruit-bearing health. Walter Knott's began selling the berries at his farm stand in 1935 and soon noticed that people kept returning to buy the large tasty berries. When asked what they were called, Knott said, "Boysenberries," after their originator.[5] As their popularity grew, Mrs. Knott began making preserves which ultimately made Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California world famous.


Who knew that Boysenberry was Knotts Berry Farms first popular berry. I like the fact that they gave the credit to the first farmer who tried to cultivate it.