In article , enigma
wrote:
wrote in
ups.com:
Is this hard? How do they grow? Been thinking of building
some along a fence I need to build in the front yard. Can I
mulch with plastic or do they have runners? Do they flower?
Are they pretty? DO they need alot of water?
are you completely clue free? can you not read? (i thought
shy people read a lot...)
anyway, blackberries are weeds. they are easy to grow.
anything that bears fruit has flowers (skipped biology, did
you?). they need a lot of sun, so if it's sunny along your
fence, & the soil is decent, they will do ok. they aren't
particularly attractive & you will need to prune out old canes
every year & tie up the current growing canes.
how much you need to water them depends on what your soil is
like & how much rain you get. if it's really dry, you get
crappy dried out berries.
given a choice, i'd grow raspberries over blackberries any
day.
lee wondering how one builds blackberries
Blackberries don't need to be weeds, though the amount of care you
describe to keep them tidy & maximumly fruitful can be a bother compared
to low-maintenance things. There are many restrained cultivars & hybrids,
& even thornless varieties, which I find do have a degree of ornamental
value even apart from their great fruits. Even our native blackberry which
creeps along the ground is a pretty thing, like a groundcover vine. I
don't encourage that stuff, the fruits are too small to grow them for that
purpose, but they're not actively ugly, they're as pretty as many a
strictly ornamental vine.
In our area the huge Himalayan blackberries are so easily harvested from
roadsides & meadow margins & alleys & along railroad tracks, & the fruit
so enormous & tasty, I wouldn't personally want to try to compete with
what's growing free by taking up garden space with littler briars that
would produce smaller fruits than can be gotten freely during a short walk
with a bucket in hand. But I did plant thornless loganberries at Sinlur
Gardens this past year, they can have an almost woody form at their heart
& produce sideways canes from its upright center, & look quite
ornamental even pruned back to the center (or so I've seen in other
gardens, & hope I can train these thornless ones to look as nice). The
loganberries now flank an old raspberry patch, which is merely cut to the
ground each year to start over so not much labor in that. If after a year
the rhubus area hasn't seemed too much a bother of maintenance, & have
seemed sufficiently attractive since even the fruiting stuff has to serve
double-duty for prettiness too, I'll add one more hybridized blackberry
such as boysenberry or marionberry.
But I also planted three young serviceberries of two species near the same
area, so that if the rhubus are too bothersome to care for properly, they
can slowly be supplanted by large woody shrubs that are almost care-free
while producing wonderfully tasty fruits. In my own small gardens I don't
have the room to experiment like this, so this job with SinLur has been
superdooper for pursuing several projects I lacked room to do at home, & I
have already started some Sinlur Stoneworks & Gardens pages at my website,
labeled as separate from my own home, & it's a struggle not to get too
possessive of Sinlur, but what an opportunity to improve & extend an
ENORMOUS garden rather than just my wee property.
-paghat the ratgirl
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