blackberries

[Chuck52]

After seeing some at a you-pick-it, I'm planning on putting in some of the thornless blackberries this spring. I'd seen pictures in the seed catalogs for years of these really huge blackberries and didn't really believe them, but there really are some that are an inch in diameter and two inches long. Plus, they grow pretty well in my area (central Missouri). I've found relatively good plant prices at a couple of places in Arkansas, and one place sells root cuttings for about $0.35 @. I've decided on Navaho, in part because that variety is said to have smaller seeds. I want to do at least two varieties, and Arapaho was recommended as a good complement to Navaho because it is earlier bearing and would stretch the season to 6-8 weeks. At the local place where we picked, you could fill a gallon pail without walking more than ten feet along the row, and that included being picky about the berries. You could fill the pail without moving your feet if just any ripe berry would do! I'll be putting in about 100 feet to begin with, and if I can keep the birds and deer at bay, I should have enough berries for a cobbler or two. Anybody got any experience with these berries and know about the trade-offs between plants and root cuttings? I found a blurb on a University of Kentucky site that said crops started with root cuttings produced the same yield as those from plants, but it wasn't specific about time frame to achieve those results. I have questions in to the sources, but haven't gotten responses yet.

Chuck

[Stoneheartfarm]

The only thing I remember is that the quantity of next years harvest is determined by the quantity of water given this year. And, boy can they spread. You might do better putting in about 20 feet of row and then using your own shoots to expand the other 80 feet. Ours have were tilled over years ago and we still get new shoots every year.

Steve

[Chuck52]

Steve,

The new thornless varieties are said to be less prone to spreading. I'll be mowing between the rows and around the ends, so I hope not to have a problem with them taking over. Heck, if I can't control them I bet the !@#$% deer can!

Chuck

[Stoneheartfarm]

Seems to me when I ordered mine, they were billed as "suckerless". On the other hand, I ordered some Lilacs that were billed as "non-spreading". Boy, they not only don't spread, they barely grow. [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

Steve

[Pat]

Maybe it is just my "taster" but I've never tasted any thornless berries that came close to my wild ones. I get lots of berries 3/4 inch long and some up to an inch. Unfortunately I bleed easily and can't seem to pick too long without getting bloody.

Pat

[Bird]

Chuck, I think you'll find that root clippings take two to three years to produce. With blackberries, the growth this year produces next year and dies. The growth next year produces the following year, etc. And, yes, the quantity and quality of berries you get depends on the water and fertilizer the plants had last year. I've no experience with the thornless varieties; literature from Texas A&M indicated they don't do well in Texas and the quality of the berries is not as good. But I had a blackberry patch about 50 feet long and 4 feet wide and harvested from 20 to 50 quarts a year for 8 years. I kept them from spreading simply by mowing around the edges and kept any of shoots mowed down. Then each year, when they were through producing (about mid-June in my area), I mowed the entire thing down as close to the ground as possible, threw out a few handfuls of cheap granular fertilizer, and watered them the rest of the summer. For maximum yield, you could leave the current years growth, but prune in early to mid-summer it so it'll branch more, and just cut out the old growth, but that's more work than I wanted to do, especially with the thorny type I had.

And Pat, you expect to bleed a little when you pick blackberries, don't you? [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img] I usually wore a heavy leather glove on my left hand to move vines around, and picked with my right hand with no glove.

[Stoneheartfarm]

Pat,

I think it's like anything else, the closer you can keep to the native, original variety, the better it will taste. Wild strawberries beat tame ones every day, same with blueberries. Some of the best apples I've ever had came off trees that had sprouted up from cast off cores and never had any spray or pruning.

Steve

[Chuck52]

Pat and Steve,

I know what you mean about the flavor of some "imoproved" varieties of fruits and vegetables. Some of the giant strawberries, especially, are almost tasteless to me. At least the ones I've bought in the stores have been. I don't know how they are picked from the garden. The large blackberries we picked at the pick-your-own were very tasty. The juice was concentrated and the flavor seemed pretty true to me. I have a few wild blackberry patches on my place, though last year they only managed to make a small handfull of berries. A few of those tasted pretty good, but not as good as the thornless ones to me. I used to be able to pick buckets of wild blackberries back in east Tennessee, and I certainly remember them as ambrosia-like in their flavor. I don't recall many being as long as 3/4 to an inch long....that would have been a really big berry in my experience. I also remember less fondly the chiggers I picked up with the berries. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

The "Indian" varieties of tame blackberries seem to all come from the University of Arkansas program. I think the berries we picked must have been Apache, because that's the biggest of the thornless ones. A friend bought some berries at the same place and was surprised at how small the seeds seemed. I think he probably got Navaho, because he said they wern't as big as the ones we picked, and Navaho is said to have smaller seeds. By the way, according to UA, they obtain their varieties by the old fashioned method of crossing and selection, and don't use any kind of gene manipulation.

I do like wild fruits and other edibles. I've planted some wild plums around the place, as well as black walnut, pecans and native hazelnut. In fact, this year I've also ordered 25 wild-type blackberry seedlings from the state conservation department. I plan to put them in a powerline right of way that was cleared this year. So, I may get to do a direct comparison between the thornless and wild blackberries a year or so from now.

On the general subject of wild VS tame....I've had wild strawberries and blueberries I've found in the foothills of the Smokies. The strawberries really were fantastic, but there were so few it was a truely individual experience. The blueberries were growing along the trail to Gregory Bald, and kept me moving from one bush to another up the trail. They were about the only think keeping me moving up that trail at the time! [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img] My wife was skipping along, but I was the one carrying most of the camping gear. I think those were blueberries, though I guess they might have been one of the related berries. I remember them as blue and very tasty. On the other hand, I've had ramps and other wild onions, and I do prefer the various tame varieties.

Bird,

I'm getting my root cuttings from Enoch's Berry Farm in Arkansas. I talked with Mr. Enoch and made it clear that I'd be happy to pay the difference in price if the plants would give me better and faster results. He said some of his customers had bought both and thought the plants came on a bit faster than the roots, but that at his place, and he stressed "his place", he had planted both roots and plants in the same row and saw very little difference in the size of the plants at the end of the first growing season. He did say that using the plants cut back on weeding because he could lay down a heavy mulch as soon as they were planted, while he had to weed around the root plantings until the plants had come up enough to allow mulching. I'm going to get back to him with an idea I had: I'm thinking of laying 3' weed-block cloth over the root trench and slicing it right down the middle. I figure if I watch for root growth, if any canes start coming up missing the slit I can free them up and still get pretty decent weed control. Seems like it might work. I'm not all that fond of weeding. Mr. Enoch also said he typically got e decent yield of berries the year after planting. I'm really not counting on that, in part because he runs a pick-your-own as well as selling the plants, and his business depends on quick results. He buries a drip line in the trench under his plants, and I'm sure he optimizes the watering and fertilizing. I'll probably not be anywhere near that dedicated about it. As plant investments go, this will be fairly cheap. I'm only paying $26 for 50 roots, including shipping. Heck, I've killed single trees for not much less than that! [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

Chuck

[Pat]

Steve, you mention strawberries. We used to forage for wild strawberries in Ohio. Often the best pickin's were along railroad tracks. Those little (hardly larger than an English pea) berries had more flavor that the huge domestics by a wide margin. We raised strawberies in our garden, a medium sized variety, that had good flavor but coud not begin to compete with the litle wild ones.

One season we froze 52 quarts of wild strawberries. That was quite an achievment considering the handycap we operated under. No progress was made in filling our pails until we filled me first.

We have a lot of wild blackberries on our 160 acres. They are nearly of "weed" profusion. I have brush hoged a lot of them as they are trying to take over. A couple of the larger patches I brush hogged swaths through to give better picking access. I might be removing 1/2 of the bushes but ending up with 10 times more berries due to improved linear feet of access.

Note: If anyone want to "tend" their bushes... The year old canes are the producers. New canes are next years producers. Older canes can be removed to improve the patch. I have variously used pruning shears (I have the scars to prove it), pole loppers (a greater stand off distance is a good thing), and am considering my electric chainsaw on a telescoping pole. A little fertilizer is a nice gesture.

Patrick

Patrick

[Bird]

Chuck, I, too, hate weeding. My blackberry patch was actually in the back yard with good grass all around it, so the grass tended to grow in the blackberries. I tried a variety of things, but found the best thing for me was to use Round-Up in a little (pint sized) spray bottle. That way, I could get it on the grass and weeds without hitting the berry plants.

And the only place I've found wild strawberries was along the Alaska Highway in Canada. Very little experience with those, but the ones we found were sure tasty.