2 weeks ago i was in TSC and saw they had some plants. of course they are always way too early and die before they can be sold and planted out here. well i noticed they had some babycakes dwarf blackberries for $10. i have 4 of them in my patch outside in 3rd. leaf but because of over amending the soil, they haven’t produced for me yet. well i decided i would buy one and put it in a 5gal. pot under my leds in my grow room. it has since put out 6in. of growth and 6 blossoms! i know i should pinch them off but I’m going to let them set fruit for sake of wanting to try this berry finally. if anyone wants blackberries and doesn’t have room outside, i highly recommend them. they only get to 4ft. and are thornless. ill see if i can post a pic. when the lights come back on in there.
How did your baby cakes do indoors? I was wondering if it would be worth putting some cuttings indoors Under some lights to grow over winter. I have some flower buds forming on my plant outside now. I got it a month ago and it’s just the one cane now.
i moved mine outside to a raised bed and they are flowering heavily right now. the flowers i had indoors aborted as the plant was still too young to fruit. i don’t see why you couldn’t grow them inside over the winter. you may need to reduce light time to induce flowering and fruiting. this would be a good plant to experiment with. post how it goes on here. i may try this myself. i should get a good crop of these blackberries this fall. do not feed these guys like you would a outdoors full size blackberry. i burnt mine that i planted in 18’ just adding a little organic fertilizer before planting. id say just plant them in a good bag soil and let them go.
I will keep updates here. I can experiment a little with photoperiod. The one I have outside is in a 20” container, same with my raspberry shortcake. I’ve been feeding lightly with dyna-gro grow/bloom liquid fertilizer. since it started forming flower buds, some of the leaves have been showing some reddening, so I am using some of the bloom on it now to up the phosphorus.
Oh, As a starting point, How many hours of light did you give your plant when it bloomed? We currently have just over 15hrs of daylight still…
started at 18 hrs and reduced to 12. had other plants in there i had to induce to flower. 
Yea… that’s where I’m going with this too. Since I’m gardening again, and want to bring peppers indoors, I figured might as well start that again. I need to figure out what would work for the three different crops lol. I figured since peppers are for the tropics, veg chamber might be the best for them.
i start my peppers in the grow room in feb. and had little peppers on them when i put them out in the green house. the oscillating fan in there must pollinate them.
Yea I knew tomato’s and peppers can be easily pollinated with a fan or even just shaking the plant gently to stir it up. I did that with a aero garden setup in the past. So peppers will bloom and fruit in the veg chamber correct? I’ve been warned to wear gloves or wash hands well even when handling the ghost pepper plant itself, not just the peppers… might have to stick that towards the back anyway.
I have Babycakes in my garden. I also have other Blackberry varieties. Baby cakes is great for keeping small. I think it needs pollinating by other varieties, or maybe doesn’t self pollinate well in chilly spring. The first batch of berries is only partially pollinated, quite spotty. Last year, the later ones seemed to do better. All of my other blackberry varieties seem to pollinate fine. They bloom quite a bit after Babycakes floricanes.
Think actually thinking about a side by side comparison between Babycake and Heaven can wait from gurneys, said to grow to 4ft and also thornless… but not primocane fruiting.
my canadian and nelson blackberries bloomed about 10 days ago. babycake primocanes are just blooming now. all my florocanes got broken from the winter snow so no floro. crop this year. my nelsons are forming just fine. the canadians are only partially developing. seems they aren’t very self fertile either.
The Burpees site contained a message saying Babycakes are not hardy enough for here, even though they list them as zones 4-9. We are in 4 near its northern edge. Now I am having second thoughts about trying one. My Nelsons have a good crop coming, but the Darrows have not a berry coming. PAF got ripe too late in the fall, so I stopped protecting them over winter, and that was the end of those.
Mine is just about to open it’s first buds, no other black berries that could bloom with it now, so I’ll be hoping it self pollinates ok. Next season, when I have other primocane blackberries (starks prime Gems are due to ship end of this month), I’m hoping they can cross pollinate each other then. In the mean time… would pollinating it with my raspberry shortcake do much for fruit set, not to mention possibly getting a dwarf hybrid? The raspberry is still developing flower buds on the florocane while the first set of berries are starting to ripen, so it’ll be blooming still at about the same time as the blackberry. Then there’s the fall gold raspberry that is still setting flower buds too…
mine have survived my z3b 3 winters here so far but we have a lot of snow to protect them. i haven’t been able to get a florocane crop because the same snow that protects them breaks all the canes but i do get a primocane crop in sept.
To me, That’s the main attraction of primocane fruiting cultivars. I don’t have to worry about protecting the canes so much over winter to get a harvest. Plus Our fall is rather mild usually, so good harvest potential there.
Has anyone had fruit from their Babycakes blackberry yet? I’m thinking about getting one, but only if it bears good quality fruit. I don’t want to buy one just to have a gimmicky container blackberry plant.
they are good and good sized berries. because they are small plants they don’t produce a huge amount of fruit. last year i got a little over a gallon from 4 plants. starting to send up more new canes this year so i should get more.
I hope it has good flavor too, though I mostly want it for the compact size, and as a cross pollinator for any other blackberries I end up with. I bought polar berry for the novelty of it, everything else needs to have good flavor lol.
they are much better than any blackberry I’ve ever had but I’ve never had any from other than store-bought ones.