Blackberries, Raspberries and Hybrids

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They are available by DeGroot in some box stores like ACE and Meijers etc.

https://retail.degroot-inc.com/where-to-buy/

Shumway also carries them

I am awaiting your reviews on the ‘Ebay Guy’…

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about the same as your reviews were of him from a year ago :sweat_smile:

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I may need to visit my local Ace and see if they have those, thanks for the heads up

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Do strawberry posts go in here?..

I need to vent about the fact that i have over 100 potted plants sitting outside and I’ve been visited by deer and rabbits but instead of nipping at everything else…

They’ve gone for my extremely sweet mutants that i managed to keep alive from last year.

I have 2 out of 5 left in pots in front of my front door. Something has gone out of its way to find these two plants specifically and nibble on them out of all my plants… i wonder if it’s giving off a smelly smell that smells irresistibly smelly :thinking: i have it surrounded by many other strawberries just coming up, blueberries, and everything i can think of… along with dog pee on the borders cause my great Pyrenees does that… but something or somethings… have risked it for the biscuit on my 2 very specific mutant strawberries… I’m tempted to eat a leaf too to see if it tastes like stevia or sugar but there’s not many leaves left.

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Just saying that that was the first munch and many more will continue unless you change things.

Everything here has to have its own prison. And with those prisons i am up to 2 dogs and 2 new pups.

I have lost whatever my decks were supposed to be to potted plants anyone driving near my farm would think that there is some kind of militia or conspiracy nut…with all the fences, T-posts and barbed wire.

This looks to be where i am headed…
chain-link-prison-fence

I imagine at some point i would move out of my house and live in the guard tower.

I have tried every trick from irish spring soap, to hair, to pee to spraying concoctions of garlic and spoiled milk… even cigarette butts. My old timer friend sprays chewing tobacco tea on his stuff and its all immaculate and perfect. I have mentioned it on here a few times and if there was such thing as a downvote i would get it for even mentioning it. I have yet to try it due to my zest for nature vs nurture. So im relying on natural predators and my dogs to somehow make it all work… along with fences.

My deer eat multiflora rose which breaks all the rules… they eat the tips and all the young foliage and canes… so everything else is just dessert.

I am considering just going full Jeremiah Johnson and just living in my orchards with a bear if the fences and dogs dont work out.

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Which is a very good reason not to try it. It’s very dangerous, even to touch, let alone eat, for humans and pets and beneficial insects.
Those pesticides they are trying to ban because it kills all the bees…are literally nicotine but chemically safer

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Some tobacco tea type sprays can carry Tobacco Mosaic virus. I even had TMV jump from some ornamental tobacco species into my daturas and brugsmansia…

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I just got a Prime Ark Freedom mainly because of reading about people living them on here and it’s recommended for my climate. Why don’t you deal with them?

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Because they are readily available at nurseries (it’s the sentence after the one you quoted)

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I saw that thanks. Was wondering if berries offered by nursuries are not as good or something else. I know Kris knows berries that’s why was asking.

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I’ve got two of the prime arks. They are pretty good sized berries with decent taste. I’m pretty much overrun with wild blackberry, so I really don’t buy to many plants to know how good the other varieties are though.

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They eat a lot and poop big or i would try to domesticate one… i love animals, just not having to care for them cause I’m lazy.

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My poor choice of words… meaning i dont trade or sell them etc. I have grown all the prime arks and their cousins. They just arent for me in my zone as far as primocane fruiting. Too late and the best crops are to be had with the tipping at 2 feet or so technique. I like early fruiting berries myself so the only way to do that with prime arks is to let them grow out…which results in very poor fruit sets if at all some years with early frost… then wait for winter damage then prune that out to get an early floricane crop the following year. Thats how it works here in my zone…

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Not wanting to debate at all… i recently talked to an orchard owner not far from me that sprays Bayer COMPLETE insect killer on all of his fruit trees from bud break and even on his fruit. His orchard is over 40 years old and he is well in his 80s. It just works for him.

My neighbor when i was a young kid had THE nicest garden i still have ever seen. He chewed several pouches of chewing tobacco every day and had spittoons in several rooms of his house. All of it went in his garden…and tilled in with an old rickety tilller.

Supposedly one of the better defenses of Persimmon Borer is a collar of tobacco around the trunk.

I still to this day enjoy talking to other growers of things… especially if i see them having success of some sorts as i drive by their orchards or gardens or something that looks to be doing well. I have no desire to film them and that would be awkward but i hear some of the most interesting stuff that ‘cannot be true’ according to google or forums. But it is true.

I cant debate what works for someone… it just does.

I dont see me spraying my canes with anything to defend against RCB… but at some point something has to give. I probably would rather spray tobacco tea than Bayer COMPLETE…myself but maybe they are the same. Even though i have pruned everything to my liking… i am still going to have to go thru another time and prune out the RCB the best that i can.

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@krismoriah I noticed you mentioned that victory is a heavy feeder, and that the woodchips have disappeared from the base. Am I understanding correctly that you’re saying that the plants themselves cause the woodchips to get used up faster? That’s an interesting theory if so

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It would be the symbiotic fungi and bacteria that work in coordination with the plant but yes, the plant metabolism would dictate that to some extent (the plant gives sugars to them for them to work to breakdown the materials in the soil)

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I knew that there was a mycelial network underground where the plants trade with the fungus, but I didn’t realize that if the plants demanded more nutrients that would cause the fungus to work overtime breaking down woodchips even faster

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Thanks Kris, I should have read into the post again so much great information and valuable asset for this forum.

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They can only demand more if they give more sugar. That’s the limiting factor. A vigorous plant produces more sugar to give away

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In Clarks post Blackberries by the gallons

he mentions that his blackberries do a similar thing… i have grown (and am growing) his and agree.

Not to mention what Phlogopite explained.

Healthberry is somewhat uncontrollable and Victory is also in its own right… so the vigor demand i think causes the roots to form networks upon networks to ‘feed’ the top growth.

Victory turns everything into coffee ground looking stuff… or sawdust i reckon. So does healthberry… but healthberry becomes almost impossible to mulch after awhile as it becomes a thicket of nasty thorns.

I mulched Victory yesterday because i can see what looks like a spiderweb of roots poking thru that saw dust looking material… i mulched heavily last fall and its gone.

Anyways back to the story. My 3 test rows of Victory which turned out to be a permananent place was once a road so i mounded up some garden soil and then threw leaves and grass clippings on it for a solid year… in one of those rows i grew tomatoes for a year (that is supposedly a no no)… I then bombarded them with horse manure and woodchips that summer and fall… then went in the victory. Probably 50 wheelbarrows of woodchips and manure on those rows since i started them… and yesterday they looked like i had never done a thing to them. So possibly just a really healthy soil/compost that i have created a living monster with… or its the plant vigor that demands the roots to feed… or both.

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