Columbia Sunrise

Columbia Sunrise came out of the USDA-ARS trailing blackberry program at Corvallis, Oregon, where Chad Finn selected it from a cross of the female parent NZ 9629-1 with ORUS 1939-2; the original plant was found in Corvallis in July 2008 and the cultivar was introduced in 2017. Its entire reason for existing is timing: it is billed as the earliest-ripening completely thornless blackberry, reaching 5 percent ripe on 25 June and 50 percent ripe on 5 July in Oregon patent trials, roughly a week ahead of Columbia Star. The thornless trait traces back to 'Lincoln Logan', which appears four and five generations back in the pedigree, while Marion and Waldo also sit in its ancestry. Oregon growers use it to open the season for both hand-picked fresh market and machine-harvested processing fruit. Because most of the crop is off the plant by mid-July, it sidesteps much of the spotted wing drosophila pressure that builds later in the Willamette Valley summer.