Damson Preserve

If people ever ask you ‘does buying organic actually make a difference?’ tell them about damsons. Why? Because it’s one of the few occasions when you can point to something and say that buying that one product helped change things.

There was a time, not too long ago, when there was so little demand for this wonderful fruit that many farmers simply left it to rot in the orchards. That’s no way to treat one of nature’s greatest gifts.

When we decided to launch a damson preserve, we struggled to find a good organic supplier until we met Leslie James from Worcestershire. He converted his damson orchard to organic production and gave us access to his Shropshire Prune damsons. It’s these beautiful fruits that are hand-picked in August and sent to our jam-makers in Somerset.
 
Since then, our customers have helped revive the fortunes of the damson, increasing demand and encouraging more farmers to grow them. And that’s a crucial part of the Duchy philosophy – diversity of crops helps not just to protect the environment but to put interesting and different things on our plates.

It’s not been all plain-sailing though: the damson is a sensitive fruit, with highly unpredictable yields. In 2003, for example, there was a minor catastrophe when warm weather encouraged mould and the British damson harvest failed almost totally. Those farmers who had doused their fruit in pesticide and fungicide survived, but for organic producers like us, there was nothing left.

It’s frustrating, but that’s the risk you take with organic food. In a way, it’s good to be reminded that growing food isn’t and shouldn’t be like manufacturing computers or making cars.

Of course that doesn’t mean we weren’t pretty annoyed when we had nothing to put on our toast.