Blue Ribbon

'Blue Ribbon' is a Fall Creek Farm & Nursery release from Lowell, Oregon, bred by David Brazelton and Adam Wagner from a 2002 cross of 'Toro' as seed parent with the unpatented selection G344, and pulled out of a high-density seedling field in the summer of 2005. It is protected by a US plant patent (application US20130239265P1, granted as PP24636), sold only through Fall Creek, and growers are barred from propagating it. The breeding target was the hand-picked fresh market, and the patent trial data reads that way: berries average 2.4 g and firmness measures 196 g/mm deflection against 148 g/mm for 'Duke', with yields roughly double Duke's at both two and three years in the ground. In the harvest calendar it slots between two of Fall Creek's own benchmarks, starting one to two weeks after 'Duke' and one to two weeks before 'Draper', with an average start date of 21 July in the Oregon trial. It has been taken up in Iberia and Morocco as well, which is why trade material there quotes a far lower chilling figure than the patent does.