Grandfather Trehane planted the very first blueberries in the UK back in 1949, having responded to a post war article in 'The Grower' magazine offering 100 free blueberry plants from Lulu Island, British Columbia.

The plants flourished on his free draining, acidic soil and the decision was taken to plant commercially. 1000 plants arrived on the Queen Mary in 1959 and my Mother, Jennifer Trehane, was duly instructed to collect them. Between David snr and Jennifer, this pioneering plantation was planted below the family home in Dorset, UK.

The plantation flourished and the fruit was sold to high class grocers as a delicacy, achieving very high prices. When Grandfather retired to Cornwall in 1968, he handed the management of the plantations to his son, Jeremy Trehane, who expanded the plantations to around 8 acres.

This acreage was retained until 1998. We (Jennifer and David jnr) purchased 5 acres of the original plantations from Jeremy in 1995 and immediately put into place vigorous development plans for the entire blueberry business. Some of the area remaining with Jeremy now hosts a succesful blueberry PYO operation during August.

For details of PYO only, contact Jeremy Trehane on 01202 873490.

This is a separate business, not directly linked to The Dorset Blueberry Company so please don't contact them about our products. Instead E-mail us or call us on 01202 891426

The first achievement was the planting of a new plantation of 5 acres, doubling our acreage in one go; using primarily Duke to remove the peaks of harvest caused by an emphasis on main season varieties in the old plantations, along with a few rows of Bluecrop and a trial of Elliot. In 2000 we also installed a new packhouse which is acceptable to our main supermarket customer, Marks and Spencers.

We now have over 25 acres in the ground, some of which will crop delicious fresh blueberries in 2007.

Value Added Products

Just prior to the harvest of 2000, we were unfortunate to fall victim to a vicious hail storm which lasted no more than 3 minutes, but took the quality from approximately 60% of our crop.

Instead of accepting this loss and throwing the damaged fruit on the ground at harvest time, we decided to use Farmers Markets to sell this fruit in the form of other products. We quickly realised that this was a good move.

In October 2000 we were awarded an Innovation Grant from the DTI, which enabled us to introduce professional branding to our products, develop new products and indeed, create this website.