Grow Blackberries in Your Garden!

 

  Blackberries are yummy. Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t like blackberries? Probably not. I certainly haven’t met any and wouldn’t trust them if I did.

  Blackberries are very easy to grow and can be grown almost anywhere. Add this to the fact that they taste as scrumptious as they do, and they makes for an impressive addition to the home garden.

 Blackberries can be hard to find in grocery stores. Due their very short shelf life they have defied attempts at large scale commercial cultivation. The berries that do end up at the store are usually lacking in flavor and appearance. For a taste that money truly cannot buy, you have to grow these jewls yourself. If you pick wild berries, you’ll quickly grow to love the large size and great flavor of the cultivated strains.

If you live in the South, fall is the perfect time to plant blackberries. For everyone else, you can start getting your soil ready for spring planting now.

In this article-

Soil Prep and Planting

Varieties

Care and Pruning

Harvesting

 Soil Prep

  Your blackberry planting will last you basically forever. 30 Years or more. So it’s important to do whatever soil preparations you need now and do it right. Luckily for you, blackberries are okay with most soils and conditions, but they absolutely must be well drained. It may help to build your future patch it’s own raised bed to make sure the plants don’t end up with wet feet.  

  If you have compost available- great!  Dig yourself a wide trench where you intend to plant the berries and mix a good supply of that black gold into it. If you don’t have compost, then rotted manure, old leaves (should have plenty of those this time of year), coffee grounds, or any other quality source of organic matter will do just fine. Mix the soil and organic matter source in the trench thoroughly.

  If your soil is not very fertile, a balanced (preferably organic) fertilizer will help your Blackberries get off to a good start. I like to use dried chicken manure pellets I get from a local mill. There are many different kinds of balanced organic fertilizers. Bloodmeal and bonemeal are more readily available but also more expensive. A soil texturer like Greensand might be a good idea as well.

  But don’t sweat over it. After all, these things are freakin weeds in many places.

Another note- blackberries prefer an acid soil. If your soil is very alkaline (high pH), consider adding ground rock sulfur or even getting some topsoil from a nursery. From my experience, adding pine straw, pine bark, or other acid plant materials doesn’t do squat. If your soil is very acid to begin with, it may need added calcium. Even alkaline soils need calcium sometimes. See this post

 Set out the plants 3 feet apart in rows no closer than 5 feet.

Varieties

  Picking out your varieties is the fun part! Blackberries fall into four categories- Thornless Erect, Thorny Erect, Thornless Trailing, and Thorny Trailing. Dewberries make up another group, which is broken down into red and black. But I won’t be going into dewberries right now.

   Many people immediately go for thornless and don’t bother looking at cultivars with thorns. This is a mistake. I believe too many people are remembering painful wild blackberry picking trips, and they don’t realize that cultivated varieties are much less sprawling and the berries are easier to get to. Trust me, picking without injury is definitely possible. There’s also a great invention called gloves, which you should have brought on that wild berry picking excursion anyway. There are too many delicious thorny varieties to rule them out of your planting.

 I would like to make a case against trailing blackberries. While there are many good tasting trailing varieties, the extra work involved in building and maintaining a trellis is simply not worth the effort considering the multitude of good and better erect bushes. Besides, trailing varieties tend to be less winter hardy for you northern folks.

 You want fresh berries for as long as possible, so pick varieties with ripening times in mind. Like the following-

 Choctaw- Very Early, thorny

 Brazos- early, thorny

 Early Triple Crown- Very sweet, good producer, early (duh), thornless

 Arapaho- Mid season, thornless

 Kiowa- Freakin HUGE! Mid season, thorny

 Navajo- Firm berry, ripens late, good quality, relatively small, thornless

  There are many, many more varieties out there. Do your own research and pick the ones you like the sound of best. Don’t feel constrained to just grow those available at your local nursery. There are several online nurseries that ship across country for less than you might imagine. Blackberry plants ship very well, generally. 

 Two terms you should become familiar with concerning blackberries and raspberries are ‘Floricanes’ and ‘Primocanes’. Floricanes are two year old canes. These canes produce fruit and then die back. Primocanes are one year old growth, and they become the floricanes of next year. The primocanes of today are the floricanes of tommorow!

  Recently, the University of Arkansas released two groundbreaking varieties, ‘Prime-Jim’ and ‘Prime-Jane’ These ‘primocane’ varieties produce fruit on both types of canes. The floricanes first, and then a crop of the primocanes a month later. These amazingly awesome varieties are not recommended in my area (I’m getting some anyway, though) due to high temperatures during that ‘month later’ primocane crop. However, in cooler weather areas like Oregon they excel. Give them a try!

Care and pruning

 Pruning isn’t difficult for erect blackberries, and since you aren’t planting trailing berries we won’t have to worry about them, will we? After harvest, remove the old canes. This will reduce disease pressure. In mid-summer, if the canes get too tall, prune them back to where you are comfortable with them. 4-5 feet is good. In spring, prune out weak canes and leave the four or five most vigourous.  You can prune the lateral branches (ones that grow horizontal to the main stem) back at this time for a neater, bushier plant.

  The plants may try to spread. Cut out rouge shoots with a vengeance when they get outside your designated row. Keep blackberries mulched at all times to limit watering and maintain even moisture.

Harvesting

  It’s easy to get excited and anxious and pick blackberries to early. At least it is for me, I’m not very patient and I love blackberries. These two qualities don’t go together. If you are patient, however, wait till every hint of redness is gone. Ripe berries will be soft (feel free to give them a tiny squeeze between two fingers), and the individual ‘fruits’ on the berry will be large and appear full of juice.

There’s nothing in the world to compare to a wonderfully ripe blackberry, and they’re well worth the time and space in the garden! Freakin get out there and plant them already!