Blackberries, tayberries, currants and haskaps

Alongside strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and boysenberries, a handful of New Zealand farms grow berries you will rarely see in a shop. They are worth a detour, partly because they are good and partly because you cannot buy them.

Blackberries

Cultivated blackberries are nothing like the roadside brambles: larger, sweeter and mostly thornless. They run summer into autumn, a little later than raspberries, with farms in Auckland, the Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay.

A ripe blackberry is black all over with no red at the tip, and it has gone dull rather than glossy. Unlike a raspberry it keeps its core when picked. A shiny berry that resists is not ready and will be sour.

Note that wild blackberry is a declared pest plant in much of the country. Picking from a farm is a different thing entirely from picking a roadside thicket, which may have been sprayed.

Tayberries

A raspberry and blackberry cross: long, dark red, softer and more aromatic than either parent, and far too fragile to sell. Where a farm grows them the season is short, in summer, and they are usually picked alongside the raspberries.

Treat them like raspberries but gentler. They are best eaten the day they are picked, and they make the best crumble of anything on this list.

Blackcurrants

New Zealand grows blackcurrants commercially at scale, but self-pick is uncommon. Where you find it, the season is summer and the fruit hangs in strigs, the little stems that hold six or eight berries.

Pick whole strigs rather than individual berries: it is far faster, and you strip them at home with a fork over a bowl. Blackcurrants are too sharp to eat raw for most people and are made for cordial, jam and cassis.

Haskaps

The newest of them, also called honeyberry. An elongated blue berry on a low bush, related to honeysuckle rather than to blueberries, with a flavour somewhere between blueberry and raspberry. It is one of the earliest crops of the season, ripening from late spring before almost anything else, which is its main attraction.

A ripe haskap is deep blue outside and red-purple inside. The outside colours well before the fruit is ready, so the only real test is to open one. There is a haskap grower in Canterbury on this site.

Why these are worth the trip

None of these travels well, which is precisely why they are not in shops and why a self-pick farm is the only practical way to get them. If a farm near you lists one, it is the most interesting thing you can pick that week.

Updated 10 September 2026