Cultivating Wild Blackberries
Blackberries are a popular fruit for the home gardener. Blackberries taste good and are highly nutritious. There are a great number of cultivated blackberry varieties that work well in the home garden. Many of them are thornless. Thornless blackberries are easier to pick since pickers don't get thorn scratches.
Even thornless blackberries develop shoots with thorns and so have to be pruned and cultivated intensely to provide good harvests. There are wild blackberries that can be cultivated and that will provide excellent harvests. A very common imported blackberry is the Himalayan blackberry. This blackberry is widely naturalized and is considered a virulent pest in many areas. The Himalayan was introduced to the United States to provide a blackberry that would produce well under adverse conditions. This it does quite well.
The Himalayan blackberry can be cultivated to produce spectacularly large harvests of sweet berries. There are four secrets to growing these blackberries successfully. The first secret is good soil. These blackberries will grow in almost any soil, but they perform best in a rich, loose soil, such as is commonly found in home gardens.
The second secret is to provide a trellis to support the canes. The cane tips droop and will root in unwanted places if not kept off the ground. A common fence type trellis will suffice to keep these blackberries in bounds. The canes are woven into the trellis wires. A trellis also provides a shape to the canes that is easier to harvest than a haphazard arrangement.
The third secret is proper watering. The berries are very drought tolerant, but they will produce a considerably larger crop if watered deeply at least once a week.
The fourth and final secret is care of the canes. Blackberries send up a large cane in the spring. This cane gathers energy all summer to store in the roots. This root energy allows the plant to get started in the spring. In the spring, the last years new canes produce berries and die off. On thing needed is to cut out the old canes after they have produced their crop. The second cane cultivation technique involves pruning the new canes as they grow. If the tip of the new growing cane is cut off, side shoots develop on the cane. All the side shoots will produce berries the following summer. The side shoots produce several times the amount of berries that unpruned canes produce. This increases the harvest many fold. Simply wait until the new canes are three or four feet long and clip off about six inches of the cane. This will cause the side shoots to develop.
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