Cambridge Rival strawberries Australia

For over a dozen years I have been trying to find somewhere to by a "Cambridge Rival" strawberry plant.  I have heard so much about them.  Cambridge Rival are meant to be the best tasting strawberries in Australia.

Diggers used to have them, but I have had such bad experiences with Diggers on many many occasions, plus their prices are unreasonable for low quality plants, and postage price is incredibly high, that I really didn't want to buy anything from them if I could help it.  I looked around, and asked around, but had no success. 

As it has been so many years of searching and I have had no success I decided to bite the bullet, spend a fortune to buy a plant from Diggers, and hope they did not send me the wrong plant that had been mis-labelled, or a dead plant, or a plant covered in mildew, or any of the other nonsense that they have repeatedly done in the past when I have bought from them.  Strangely enough, I looked one day and they had them listed but the following day when I was planning to complete my order they had been removed from their list.  I guess it wasn't meant to be.

I kept looking, and asking around, and eventually found a home gardener who grew Cambridge Rival strawberries and sent me some plants.

Cambridge Rival strawberry

 

Cambridge Rival strawberries have white flowers and can either self pollinate or be pollinated by another variety.  Cross pollination does not change the taste.  They are said to throw a lot of runners but my plants have not done much of that yet.  They are only meant to crop once or twice per year in my climate, which is a down side of this variety. 

My plants survived winter and flowered in spring.  The first berries ripened early December.  A second flush of fruit ripened in February.  The berries were mid-sized, and red.  The colour of these was nice, even the inside of the berries was rather red.  The berries themselves were nice and soft, making them unsuitable for commercial harvest but perfect for the home grower.  They smelled rather nice for a garden strawberry, which was novel.

The taste of Cambridge Rival strawberries was incredible and unrivaled by anything else I grow.  They were intensely sweet, and pretty sour, at the same time.  They had a depth of flavour that I really enjoy.  The texture of these was very soft.  It sounds cliched but they did sort of melt in my mouth.  I have only eaten them perfectly ripe, I have no idea what they taste like a day or two before being ripe.

The richness of flavour, combined with the nice strawberry smell and the texture makes Cambridge Rival my favourite strawberries.

I have saved some of their seeds and should plant them at some stage.  Seeds that were self-pollinated will not produce Cambridge Rival strawberries.  These are octoploid and largely heterozygous, meaning every seedling will be genetically unique.  While most seeds will not be as good as the parent, some may be much the same, and there is a chance that some may be even better.

At some stage I need to track down a good day-length neutral strawberry and cross it with Cambridge Rival in the hopes of producing a day-length neutral strawberry that is of similar quality to these.

Cambridge Rival strawberries with insect damage

As you can see from the berries in the background of the above picture, other things also like to eat these strawberries.  I grow everything organically, so the earwigs and slaters tend to get into my strawberries.  This frustrates me greatly.  There isn't much I can do unless I spray, and I am not keen on spraying, so I have to put up with it.

Given how difficult Cambridge Rival strawberries were to track down, and how great they taste, I plan to let my plants throw as many runners as they want.  If I ever have a few spare plants I will offer them through my for sale page.  I can't imagine I will ever have too many extras of these though as I really want to grow a lot more of them myself!

Black raspberry from seed - first winter

North American black raspberries (Rubus occidentalis) are virtually unheard of in Australia.  So rare that most gardeners in this country are unaware that such a thing even exists.

I have grown a few black raspberry plants from seeds.  Rubus are considered difficult to grow from seed, but I seem to do ok with them.  Being winter means my black raspberry plants are all dormant and I can have a decent look at them.

The difference between each of the seed grown plants in incredible.

Some seedlings are very vigorous, while other seedlings lack vigour.  Some grew to about an inch tall in the season, while others reached about 3 feet tall.  Some grew a single cane, while others grew multiple canes.  

These don't fruit in their first year, so I am yet to taste the fruit from them, it will be interesting to see if any produce more fruit than other plants or better tasting fruit.  

One thing I find fascinating is the thorns (prickles) on my black raspberry seedlings.  One plant has thick curved thorns that grab at my clothes and tear at my skin.  Another has many many prickles that are straighter and thinner and resembles the wild roses that grow as weeds around here.

Black raspberry cane

Black raspberry cane

I have no idea if my black raspberry is monoecious or dioecious, so have to wait until they flower to find out.  I don't have many plants so at this stage cannot trade them as I would hate to end up with only male plants and not be able to taste the fruit!

Unlike red raspberries (Rubus idaeus), the black raspberries root at the tip of a cane if it comes into contact with soil.  This growth habit is similar to blackberries so will need some thought into controlling them and growing them in a productive way.  Apparently hybrids between red raspberry and black raspberry (which tend to produce purple berries) also tend to root at the tip.

So far only one of my plants grew long enough to tip root.  I cut this off and it seems to have a strong root system.  This was by far my most vigorous plant, so even though the rooted tip is tiny I have no question that it will grow into a monster over summer if treated well.  I plan to dig up this little plant and send it to Shane to see how he goes growing them.

Black Raspberries - young canes covered in whitish bloom

These black raspberries are all very thorny, and from my understanding will be floricane (meaning they will only flower on last year's growth).  I dislike thorns on plants, and I much prefer primocane (meaning they can flower on new growth), so if all goes well and they thrive here I may need to do some breeding with these in the future.

One day I would love to try and cross them with my thornless primocane red raspberry, and see if I can produce a thornless purple raspberry, or a primocane purple raspberry.  Or cross them with my yellow fruited raspberry and see what the fruit from that cross is like.  These things take time, and many different things could happen to prevent this from working, so at best that is a few years away.

If I ever have some black raspberry plants to spare I will try to list them on my for sale page.  Best case scenario that will be winter next year, but really depends on a lot of different factors so may be later than that or if they don't grow well here it may be never.

Strawberry Raspberry hybrids - test results

I attempted to hybridise a strawberry with a raspberry, and I wrote numerous blog posts along the way documenting the progress. 

I produced a few F1 plants, and from them some F2 plants.  These plants displayed various morphological differences from both parent species.  The plants looked superficially similar to a strawberry, and a lot of aggressive people said this cross was impossible, so I could not be certain that they were true hybrids without getting them independently tested.  

The CSIRO offered to test some leaf samples for me to determine if they were hybrids.  Long story short, based on protein and peptide level evidence it appears that the F1 and F2 plants are intergeneric strawberry raspberry hybrids.  

No one has ever achieved this cross before.  This means my plants are the first ever documented intergeneric hybrids between strawberry (Fragaria sp) and raspberry (Rubus sp). 

The results can be seen below.  The set size represents the number of peptides detected from the samples (multiple peptides make a protein at the end).  The number on top of each column represents the peptides detected from each sample type.  You can see that the HF2 is completely different from each parent species and HF1. 

Strawberry Raspberry Hybrid - proteomics results

 The below chart represents the top 20 peptide functional classes associated with the four sample type.  These results also show the similarity and dissimilarity between the sample types based on their measured peptides.

My first F1 plants germinated in 2017 and the F2 in 2019.  It has been such a long process that I was starting to worry that I would never have these tested, or that the results would be inconclusive.  It is great to have such definitive results. 

My strawberry raspberry hybrids are vigorous and set a lot of fruit.  The taste of these strawberry x raspberry hybrids varies from plant to plant from sour to bland to really incredible.  

While there is a naming convention for binomial nomenclature, giving them a common name may be more difficult.  My daughter wants to call them "Stinkleberries".  I kind of love that name, but don't think people would want to eat them.

Below are some pictures of the leaf samples.  I have described many of the morphological differences in previous blog posts.

F1 above, strawberry and raspberry parents below

F1 above, strawberry parent below

F2 on left, F1 on right

Leaf samples that I sent

I'm not sure what to do from here.  These F1 and F2 plants could potentially be crossed with other species or other hybrids.  This holds a lot of potential for breeding new plants with increased disease resistance and/or novel tasting berries without using genetic engineering. 

It is amazing to think that this was thought to be impossible yet was achieved in my back yard, in my spare time, with no specialised equipment, and extremely limited access to germplasm.  Imagine what could be done if I had more time and money to invest in projects like this.  

If you want to help me in my plant breeding projects such as this feel free to buy something through my for sale page or even donate a few dollars to me through my PayPal.

Black Raspberry Plants in Australia

I got some seeds of black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis) a while ago.  I scarified and cold wet stratified the seeds, forgot about them for far too long, eventually planted them, and had a surprisingly good germination rates.

At this young age they look similar to red raspberry plants, but have rather vicious thorns.  

I am told black raspberries grow more like a blackberry, and have long arching canes that root at the tips when they touch the soil.  

Given how fact they have grown this large, there is a good chance they will flower next year!  I can hardly wait to see what they taste like (assuming I can get past those incredible thorns to taste the berries).

Seed grown black raspberry: 3 or 4 months old

Strangely enough, some seeds stayed in the soil and are only starting to germinate now.  So as well as those large plants you can see the pot also contains some tiny seedlings with their first true leaves.  

Those tiny seedlings may not survive summer, or may not be large enough to over winter.  Hopefully at least one of these plants fruits next spring/summer.

Black raspberry thorns are large

Red raspberry thorns are small and petite

At this stage they are growing in a pot of soil.  I should probably divide them so they can grow faster, but think I will keep them in a pot for now so I can move them around easily if needed.  

We haven't really had summer this year and I don't want them to be scorched by the sun if I can help it.  Or maybe the heat will not phase them at all, I don't know.  Time will tell if they grow well in this climate.  

Shahtoot mulberry and White mulberry

I love mulberries.  I have a few mulberry trees and really should get some more.  They are such an underrated tree and they have so many uses, both on acreage as well as in backyards.

I have a white mulberry that I grew from a tiny cutting.  This is a lovely and hard working tree.  It gets larger and stronger each year even though I planted it in a really bad position, it tries hard to fruit no matter how difficult the situation and pumps out a lot of berries, it grows many large tasty leaves, the berries taste good, and it doesn't stain things.  The berries are very sweet, some ripen white, some lavender, some pinky, and some can ripen a bit darker.

 

 

White mulberry - all picked from the same tree

I also have a white shahtoot mulberry tree.  The berries from this little tree are long, they don't stain, it produces numerous berries per bud, and they taste like honey ripened apricots.  

Unfortunately this tree is determined to die in my garden.  Every summer it grows larger, it survives winter well, in spring it starts to bud all over, and then large parts die back for no apparent reason.  I can't work out why, but there is something about spring that the tree does not cope with in my garden.  It is fine in summer, autumn, and winter, but for some reason does not like spring.

I love the taste of these berries, but am pretty sure that I will lose it one day because I don't think it is well suited to my climate.  That is too bad as it really does taste great.

Shahtoot mulberry

I originally didn't want to get a dark fruited mulberry because I am now in town and they tend to stain things, but to be honest they probably taste better than the lighter coloured mulberries.  

I have never eaten a black mulberry (Morus nigra), but am told they taste far superiour to white mulberries (Morus alba) or mulberry hybrids.  I am yet to even see a black mulberry tree, I see plenty white mulberry trees with dark fruit that are incorrectly labelled as black mulberry, but have never seen an actual black mulberry tree.  Hopefully these currently exist in Australia.

I really should look around and see if I can find a nice tasting mulberry, who cares if it stains, and grow this as well.  I am sure my kids will pick most of the berries so they won't have a chance to stain anything. 

Mulberries - shahtoot and white mulberry

Raspberry x Strawberry Hybrid - F2 seed attempt

I wrote a few posts about attempting to create a hybrid of raspberry and strawberry through cross pollination. 

The berries themselves taste amazing and the plants are very vigorous.  Without genetic testing I can not be certain that they are hybrids or if they are just weird strawberry plants that differ from the parent species. 

Most produce lumpy red berries, some produce yellow/white berries, and one is producing pink berries which I have never seen before.  There are a lot of odd morphological differences from the strawberry parent, plus they take a lot longer to reach maturity, they are larger, more vigorous, and more productive than the strawberry parent.  While I am not yet certain if they are hybrids, I know is that they differ from the parent strawberry species in quite a lot of ways.

To be clear, this is not 'funberry' (also called "strawberry raspberry") which is not a hybrid but is a species Rubus illecebrosus that looks superficially similar to a strawberry and a raspberry.  This is not a 'strassberry', which is just a variety of strawberry.  This is not a Genetically Modified plant.  This is a true hybrid between strawberry and raspberry that I created using simple cross pollination in my yard.

If I have created a fruiting hybrid of a strawberry and a raspberry the next logical step is to attempt to grow seed and produce some F2 seedlings.  These seedlings could have any of a myriad of genetic combinations and would range from plants that contain mostly raspberry genes, to some that were half raspberry half strawberry like the parent, to some that contained mostly strawberry genes.  This is an oversimplification of what could happen, but I can't go into that here.

When the hybrid started fruiting I began collecting seeds from it.  I am unsure if they were the result of self-pollination, or raspberry pollen, or strawberry pollen, as there were many things flowering at the time and many insect pollinators around.  I did not exclude the flowers in any way as I wanted to give them the best chance of being successfully pollinated and setting viable seed. 

As no one has successfully created this hybrid and had it set fruit before there is much to be learned. More importantly, this plant if it is a true intergeneric hybrid holds a lot of breeding potential for disease resistant berries as well as amazing new tastes, but only if it either sets viable seed or if it produces viable pollen.  Given that both parents were diploid and have the same chromosome count I figured that this shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

I decided if I collected 2 or 3 seeds from each berry we would still be able to eat all the berries and I would slowly get a large number of seeds.  It was a rather productive little plant so it did not take me too long before I had a reasonable amount of seed to play with.  The seeds were not hollow, they were plump and full, they ranged in size from tiny strawberry seed size to extra-large strawberry seed size, so I collected a mixture of all the seeds.

I usually have some success germinating raspberry seeds and often 100% success with strawberry seeds.  I usually put strawberry or raspberry seeds in cold wet stratification to get them to germinate, if I leave them for too long they tend to germinate in the fridge.  I also sent some of these F2 seeds to a grower friend, hopefully they get some decent results from growing them.

I put the seeds through cold wet stratification because this method works well for both parent species.  Sunlight can trigger some seeds to germinate, and makes no noticeable difference to the germination of others, so I did both.  Some of the seeds were left in the fridge for a longer cold wet stratification while others were planted on damp soil on the window sill where I usually germinate strawberry and raspberry seeds.

I started with many hundreds of seeds.  The results were as follows:

03/03/2019 strawberry x raspberry F2 seeds put in cold wet stratification
10/06/2019 three (3) seeds germinated


No other seeds have germinated at all, only these three, which is odd.  I expected a lot more seeds to germinate considering the numbers that I stratified. 

None of the seedlings displayed any albinism.  All three looked like small strawberry plants.

None of them have produced any runners.  The strawberry line this is from produces a lot of runners in two to three months when grown from seed.  These three plants are now over a year old and none have flowered while the strawberry line produces flowers in five months when grown from seed.  At this stage the F2 plants are small, smaller than the F1 and smaller than the strawberry parent.  I am unsure if they will stay small or if they will get larger once they mature.  Given that they are well over a year old I would have expected them to reach full size by now.

From here I plan to do my best with the three that have already germinated, hopefully one of them turns into something interesting.  I also plan to save some more seed and try to germinate it, I would also like to use raspberry pollen and see if that produces viable seed.

It will be interesting if any of these F2 seedlings survive to maturity to see what their fruit is like.  At this stage they have survived winter and look much like strawberry plants only smaller.  The strawberry parent flowers around five months when grown from seed, this plant is sixteen months old and is still not flowering.  The F1 plants flower earlier in the season and more profusely than the strawberry parent, the F2 has still not flowered. 

Leaf comparison: F2 hybrid on the left, F1 hybrid on the right

While none of this actually proves anything and there is a chance that they are not hyrbids, it all lends weight to the possibility that the parent may be a true intergeneric hybrid.  If it is not a hybrid, then it is a mutant with rather frustrating timing.  I sent samples of these plants for testing, so should hopefully have some answers very soon.

Edit to add: early/05/2021 flowering - over two years from seed to maturity!!!  Given the parent strawberry flowers in about 5 months this is remarkable and indicative that it is a hybrid.

Edit to add: this was tested by the CSIRO.  The results are on this blog post. 

Strawberry Raspberry hybrid leaves being tested soon

I have written a few posts about my attempt at creating a strawberry raspberry hybrid using cross pollination.  While the resultant plants display several morphological differences to the parent species, and are far more vigorous than the strawberry parent, the plants do look remarkably like a strawberry. 

I made every effort to ensure a hybrid was produced (emasculating flowers, bagging flowers, etc), and while this would exclude flying insects such as flies or bees this attempt was produced in the field.  As such there is a chance that some tiny ant was able to crawl under my bag and pollinate the flowers with pollen from who knows where. 

For this reason I have been trying for quite some time to have these plants tested by a lab to determine if they are hybrids or something else (perhaps they are polyploid, perhaps a mutation).  For various reasons I have not yet been able to have these plants tested, which has been rather frustrating.

Recently someone contacted me who knows someone in the CSIRO who may be able to test my plants.  I contacted the CSIRO, we had a discussion, and they are willing to test my plants.  I have sent the CSIRO sample leaves of several F1 hybrids, one F2 hybrid, and samples of both parent plants for analysis. 

If all goes well I will know before Christmas if they are hybrids.  Regardless of the outcome I will post the results on this blog.  Exciting times!

Hybrid leaves top, strawberry parent leaf lower left, raspberry parent leaves lower right

F1 hybrid leaves on right, F2 hybrid leaves on left

Hybrid leaf - long petiolules not quite opposite

Hybrid leaf at top, parent strawberry lower

Hybrid - inconsistent flowers and a lot more flowers per set

Strawberry Raspberry Hybrid - other plants

I wrote several previous posts on attempting to create true intergeneric strawberry x raspberry hybrids.  I also wrote a post on how while intergeneric hybrids are sometimes possible and all signs point to my attempt being successful I am not certain if I succeeded.  I can't be certain that it is a hybrid unless the plant is tested genetically.  I contacted a genetics lab before Christmas, had a bit of email exchange with them, but they are yet to tell me a price to have my plant tested. 

Over summer my original strawberry raspberry hybrid plant suffered badly.  It does not look good and hopefully it survives winter.  If this plant does survive there is a good chance it will grow and fruit again in spring.

As well as my first plant I had a lot of seed left over from that first attempt, so I planted more of this seed and ended up with a few more plants. Some are much like the original attempt, others are a bit different.  The differences are rather interesting.

Yellow white berries and elongated petiolules

Again there was a low germination rate, lots of albinism, and a lot of mysterious early seedling deaths.  Most of the plants display the same sorts of morphological oddities as the first hybrid.  These have taken over ten months to flower, as opposed to the five months of the strawberry parent.  The flowers tend to be irregular and inconsistent.  Leaf shape is variable and usually displays greatly elongated petiolules which is uncharacteristic for the strawberry parent species.

All of this suggests that they may be true hybrids.  To be clear, I can not be certain unless they are genetically tested.

Six petals and a stamen in the wrong place

They all look much like strawberry plants.  Most produce red berries much like the initial hybrid.  One thing that surprised me is some of them produce yellow/white fruit.  Which is remarkable considering that the strawberry parent has red fruit.

I have never had a red fruited strawberry produce a yellow or white fruited seedling, which indicates that red is probably dominant and the parent is likely homozygous for red fruiting genes.  If the parent plants were heterozygous for the yellow/white gene I would have seen a lot of other yellow fruited plants before now.

Strawberry x raspberry hybrid can be quit lump

One plant even produces light coloured berries that are a little bit pink!  Unfortunately there were very few berries.  I will have to take more pictures of this in spring when they start producing fruit again.  As they are flowering in cold weather not all of the flowers are setting fruit. 

I left the berries in the pictures below to over ripen to see if they would turn more red.  They stayed pink no matter how long I left them on the plant.  I left one to the point of rotting, and it still stayed pink and did not turn red.  Considering the parent strawberry has only ever produced red fruited seedlings this pink fruited plant came as quite a surprise.

I am quite fond of the pink berry plant.  These produced rather pretty pink berries that smell nice and taste nicely sweet, so I hope they turn out to be productive in warmer weather and I can somehow divide it.  

Pink strawberry raspberry hybrid

Only time till tell which of these plants, if any, are worth keeping. 

I also planted some seeds from the original hybrid and currently have three F2 plants that I am growing out.  So far they are about ten months old and none of them have flowered and none have produced any runners.  I will be interested to see what they turn into.

Extra petals, flowers subtended by a leaf

Only 5 petals on this one, this plant never sets fruit

Yellow/white strawberry raspberry hybrid

Unlike the original hybrid or the pink fruited plant, the plant that is producing yellow or white berries is a bit bland, they also aren't very fragrant.  This may be due to the berries ripening in cooler weather.  In spring when it starts to fruit again hopefully they taste a bit nicer.

Similar to the original hybrid, these yellow/white ones have achenes on the outside, and can be a bit lumpy and bumpy.  Even though the strawberry parent produces a huge number of runners from a young age this yellow fruiting one has not produces any runners as yet.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

I sent samples of these plants to the CSIRO who tested them and determined that they are true hybrids.  The results can be seen here.

While I don't sell these, I do sell some strawberry plants when I have enough to spare.  If you are interested they are listed on my for sale page.

strawberry raspberry hybrid plants

It is time for another update on my strawberry raspberry hybrid. The plant still looks like a strawberry plant. While I took every precaution to prevent stray pollen I can’t ever be truly certain it is a hybrid unless it is independently tested by a lab, I will provide an update on that later in this post.

While the strawberry parent grows runners from a few months old this plant has never produced any runners.  I unsuccessfully attempted to divide the crown in early spring, for a while it looked promising has since died.  Unfortunately this means that all my eggs are in one basket.  I find this rather stressful.  I do have some other plants, but I really like this first one.

Note the greatly elongated petiolules and bumpy berry

The plant itself is still producing flowers that are subtended by a leaf, and they often have extra petals.  It is still producing leaves which usually have greatly elongated petiolules and the leaflets are sometimes oddly shaped.

It fruited a few weeks earlier in spring than the strawberry parent, and it produces more flower stalks and more flowers per stalk than the strawberry parent, making it a productive plant.  The strawberry parent produces up to 8 flowers per stalk with 5 to 6 being average while the hybrid is averaging 10 flowers per stalk.

Lumpy hybrid berry

The first few berries produced in spring tasted horrible, very sour, and not fragrant.  The first berries also looked different to last year, they were rounder and had very deeply set achenes.  As the season has progressed they started getting longer and tasting better much nicer like the previous year.  Most of the berries have all of the achenes on the outside just like a strawberry.

Three of the berries had achenes on the outside like a strawberry but also contained a small number of seeds internally within the flesh like a raspberry.  I am not sure why this was happening, it may be a genetic thing or may be a result of insect damage?  I have not taken a photo of this as it happens so infrequently.

In spring the plant was considerably larger than any of the parent strawberry species.  The petioles are much longer and thicker, while the leaflets are considerably longer and wider.  Petiolules are virtually absent in the parent species, but are often elongated in this hybrid.  Leaf size varies with the season so I try to compare it to the strawberry parent, and so far it is much larger.  I had a lot of plants of the parent species, and none of them was even close in size to the hybrid. 

The berries are white inside

I collected seed from the hybrid as well as from the parent strawberry.  It was not until I had two little bags of seed side by side that I noticed the hybrid achenes are larger than the strawberry achenes.  They weren’t all larger, some were the same size, but on average they were noticeably larger.

I had started to wonder if perhaps this plant was not a hybrid but was a result of spontaneous polyploidy.  Polyploidy can cause larger leaves and fruit, it can cause more vigorous growth and more flowering, it can cause odd flower structures and other morphological abnormalities, often polyploids taste comparatively insipid but sometimes they can taste good, and it could explain all of the difference I have seen.  I wanted to see if it was polyploid.  I took a sample of pollen from this plant as well as both parent species and observed them under a microscope.  Polyploid pollen is often larger than diploid pollen.  Surprisingly they were indistinguishable and none of the pollen was noticeably different.

I emasculated and bagged some flowers and attempted to pollinate them by hand.  I missed blackberry season last year and attempted to pollinate some with youngberry pollen and others with raspberry pollen.  Flowers that were not pollinated or were pollinated with youngberry aborted early, indicating that fruit set is caused by effective pollination and not through apomixis.

I want to try youngberry pollen or any of the blackberry aggregate this year as I have a feeling it may be possible.  Some of the raspberry pollinated flowers aborted late, and some appear to have been successful and were forming fruit until they were eaten by something in my garden.  If these were a hybrid then these seeds would carry three quarter raspberry genes and I would love to have seen what the resultant seedlings looked like.

Most have weird bumps and lumps for some reason

So far, everything indicates that this probably is a true intergeneric strawberry raspberry hybrid, but I can’t be certain.  I contacted a lab to get this plant tested to determine if it is a true hybrid.

After several attempts and being told that my request had been passed on and must have fallen through the cracks the lab eventually replied.  They said this specific testing has never been conducted, but it may be possible. They also warned me that as this type of analysis has not previously been performed it is unknown if there will be enough variation between the parental strains to determine if the hybrid is a true hybrid.  A brief literature search indicates that both parent species have been extensively studied, meaning that there is a high chance of this test being conclusive.

I provided them with further details, twice, and am still waiting for them to reply with pricing and further details.  Hopefully this is within budget and they are able to conclusively determine if this is a hybrid or just an interesting mutant strawberry.  I have no idea what a test like this would cost but I really want to know for sure if this is a mutant or is the first ever fruiting strawberry raspberry hybrid.  Who knows, I may turn to some form of crowd funding in order to cover the cost.

Below are some pictures of the berries, most have weird bumps or lumps, a small number look like the strawberry parent.  I have some other exciting news about strawberry raspberry hybrids, but that will wait for another blog post.

Edit to add: I sent samples of these plants to the CSIRO who tested them and determined that they are true intergeneric strawberry raspberry hybrids.  The results can be seen here.