I have an abundance of wild or left to go wild Blackberries and Raspberries all along my woodlines. I also have a thornless huge unidentified blackberry that was taking over a raised bed garden. Luckily they are delicious.
I have planted: Kiowa, Ebony King, Anne Raspberry, Heritage Raspberry, and Boyesenberry.
My dogs love their snacks while we walk around.
Thats a good one for not having to cultivate… I saw a guy growing it along a fence line and got the idea… it does very well without help unlike the others.
I have it in a row now but have put many more in my nature habitat… they are good and strong and do very well… not much maintenance needed.
Some of the stoutest strongest canes and nice juicy berries as well.
I was out exploring The Amish farms in Ethridge, they had amazing blackberry systems. Like a vinyard. Clean, neat, abundant, and easy to pick.
i live in northern Aroostook county. we call it the other Maine for a reason. I’ve been keeping my eyes out for jap. beetles but I’ve never seen any. occasionally we get some webworms but fairly rare. they too only showed up about 4 years ago. up until now our winters were too cold. Orono is speaking mostly for central Maine south. i take the information they put out with that in mind. we also don’t have brown tail moth infestations like they have down south. 200 miles makes a big difference on what pests are issues.
Government agencies have in recent years hung traps in people’s parking strip trees for J-beetles and other pests. I have never seen the beetles here.
This year’s berry patch pests to date: A small bug similar to Chinch Bug (100s) and stink bugs (2 dozen).
MIA this year: Aphids, leafhoppers.
I had never seen any Japanese beetles (is that racist?
) here in eastern KS until about 15 years ago.
Nah… i grow Mexican Sunflowers. I like Canadian Geese… I have some Chinese Chestnuts here on the farm. Sometimes i will eat some Italian Green Beans… some mornings i will make French Toast. German Potato Salad sounds good right now. I drank Columbian Coffee this morning and added a hint of French Vanilla creamer.
Japanese beetles came here to the US at the Worlds Fair of 1916 in nursery stock.
So living here for over 100 years they deserve a better name Americanized F’n Beetles…
I’d forgotten about Mexican sunflowers/tithonia, always ordered a pkg from Burpees every year in the early 70’s. They were great!
I like to do 4- two to either side, tied to the fence. I let them grow and get bushy and wild, then cut to the ones that are biggest after leaf drop in fall.
I’m getting a handful a day now from two plants. still thinking about low maintenance, low spread blackberries for that neglected back fence
Pollinators love them in the deep summer when not much else is going on… In the Fall you can save the seeds… just shake the seed heads into a bag. If u wait too long the finches will eat all the seeds which is another reason to grow them if u like birds. There are two varieties for the most part one is tall and the other is kind of short.
Worth growing for sure if u have the room.
I have a patch of mexican sunflowers growing in the edge of my field… i just noticed them growing there last summer… and they are back again this year. Looks like they can over winter here and come back up again… even with our 3F low last winter.
I did not plant them… a bird must have. Perhaps one of my neighbors had some growing.
These have yellow flowers and the clump of flowers grows 6 7 8 ft tall.
Down in FL a guy uses them for chop n drop… and says they are basically the same npk as chicken manure. They grow like crazy in FL… he can chop and drop them several times a season and they come right back. Not sure they would do that here.
Once my clump of them goes dormant this year… think i will dig them up and plant them out in my field in full sun and see how they do.
My clump of tithonia… growing wild.
Bees love them… several were visiting the flowers.
All those flower stems are coming out of one clump about 1.5 ft in diameter… should be easy to relocate.
Yes i got duped on the seeds of your particular cultivar… the ones u grow dont grow from seed they are sterile.
He is right (The Frugal Hugel guy)… that they are excellent fertilizer.
I grow a big patch of them every year and i Chop them down and put them on a creek bank… OMG that creek bank is exploding with growth… like insane. So i planted some fruit trees on that bank and they are doing well also.
I grow Torch… the bees lay in the flowers as if they are drunk…i think they get a big wallop of nectar and pass out.
@krismoriah … back in 2021… i bought some cuttings from a guy in FL and grew them out. I was told you could not grow them from seed… but the ones i grew from cuttings… looked pretty much exactly like the ones I found growing wild in my field. The ones growing in my field had to grow from seed. Right. ???
There are lots of cultivars… yours obviously is one that is non sterile i guess… u will have to get some seeds and plant them and see i think.
Its a love/hate plant… if u live where they grow well then they are ‘invasive’… they will also grow from cuttings and i think root cuttings also…so the one you have is probably the invasive one.
If you threw down plants there they could have rooted where u cut them as well.
For $1 worth of seed mine provide alot of biomass for sure… then u can save those seeds and keep planting them and have free green manure for a long long time if thats what u want to do.
I dug up a raspberry I found about six feet from where I expected it (in my strawberries, they’re next to the raspberries). I had expected a root/stolon to be attached to it, but only saw a very thin white shoot coming up and a small amount of fine roots attached. From maybe an inch or two beneath the soil. I planted an Anne yellow last year which produced a small amount of fruit on the primocane. Did a dropped seed germinated or did I just miss the roots from the mother plant?
Alot of folks have been posting ‘seedlings’ … what really happens in alot of cases are voles that snip off bits of root and then burrow somewhere and drop it or something.
I saw a blackberry plant coming up and out of a vole hole this year…
Seedlings do happen… but that would be a bird that ate a berry then did something else for awhile then came back again and pooped it out hours later. It happens.
Rarely do seedlings naturally happen…or else every berry that fell would choke out the mother plant and that would not be part of its plan to spread far and wide.
So in your case of the strawberry bed…probably a ground squirrel ate a berry then later ate a strawberry and pooped out the rasp seed.
So hard to know… u could have the best new raspberry ever… or a dud.
Typically berry fruits seeds are double dormant… meaning that they need scarification and stratification… or else they would take over the whole planet… Some folks dont do either and they sprout… so the science is all over the place on that.
That seedling could be from the wild also… maybe a bird flying overhead from somewhere dropped it… or from someone elses patch.
Lots of variables.
Oh yeah…
They’ve been here for about a month now I’d say, but I didn’t pay special attention so they may have been active earlier. For us they over winter as grubs so they pop up just as soon as the weather gets warm enough.
Those look pretty different from the ones I’ve grown, and in a better way I’d say. Curious which species it might be.
@TNHunter, @a_Vivaldi and @krismoriah, I think that one of the pictures above is actually Smallanthus uvedalia, pictured below:
