Choosing and pruning blackberries

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Choosing and pruning blackberries

Trick number one for growing great blackberries is choosing the right variety for your climate. Daddy gave me some starts of his Navaho and Arapaho berries that grew like gangbusters in his South Carolina garden, but they were a bust here.

After three years with no fruits, I ripped Daddy's berries out and replaced them with some unnamed blackberries from the midwife who delivered my sister. My new blackberries produced huge, beautiful berries...and also extended their primocanes for twenty feet along the trellis in each direction. Now that's a blackberry that likes our climate!

Rooted blackberry cane Since I neglected to summer tip the blackberries at three feet tall to promote branching, my winter pruning involved cutting out last year's dead canes and then whacking off about 75% of the living canes. I didn't have the heart to prune them quite as hard as I probably should have --- the photo above is the after pruning shot.

Several of the canes had touched the ground and produced massive root structures, and I dug up about a dozen of the best ones to expand my blackberry patch. I also cut the tops off the everbearing raspberries, pruned out the old floricanes on the other raspberries, trained the grapes onto their trellises, and cut out the dead bits on the blueberries. Our woody perennials are now all pruned --- a good thing too since the blueberries are already thinking of leafing out.