Blackberry Maintenance

September 4th, 2010 AndrewD

One of the winter chores is to ‘control’ your blackberry, ours is a variety called silvenberry. Over summer we got some fruit from it and other than picking the fruit, generally we ignored the plant. The fruit itself is great fresh and like most berries can be frozen. But also like any bramble you need to control it as it spreads quickly. So for those interested in growing it, some information.

Blackberries are the great excape artists of plants, they want to spread, we keep ours in a raised bed and have three blackberry plants.

If you are going to plant some I would recommend a raised bed as they do like good drainage, when it comes to soil type they are not too fussy.

The way it spreads are three fold.

• Birds eat the fruit and drop the seed, the version of blackberry we have, has lots of thorns, so no problems from the birds yet.
• Runners, they do send up runners near the plant, these are not to bad but must be kept in check, so just cut them back.
• Vines trailing on the ground. Over summer they send out vines, if these touch the ground, generally it will send out roots. Now these vines can be long, approx 2-3 metres away from the plant.

This year we did prune them fairly heavily so I am not sure we will be getting to much fruit from them this summer as generally the fruit appears on 2nd year wood, but as I generally ignored them the summer past this needed to be done.

One last point is that the runners will become kindling for the fireplace.

Now my raspberries are a different matter, they spread via suckers and as all my raspberries are what is referred to autumn raspberries, they are much easier to take care of, in winter you just trim them all down to the ground. They fruit on new wood. If you have summer raspberries they friut of second year wood, so you only take out the parts which friuted the year before.

And the best part was we were getting raspberries till May.

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