The last of my illini blackberries for this year.
Cut out and pulled the spent fcanes… tied up nice and tidy the new pcanes. Now i can give the pcanes some fertilizer and water to build them up for a good crop next year.
5 Likes
i only cut the floricanes out in early spring. read somewhere that you should allow the nutrients to go back to the crown in late fall so the energy can go into next years primocanes and fruit. im thinking thats more important here in the north. your weather isnt as hard on them as mine is.
@steveb4 …i think you are right about that working for northern locations… but it does not work for me down here in the hot humid south.
On raspberry and blackberry down here… when the fcanes are spent… even in the last week of fruiting… (and especially in extra hot seasons like this one)…those fcanes go down fast… leaving dead funky canes mixed in with my new pcanes too long… and my new pcanes start grtting funky.
Foilage issues…
Even when i take out the spent fcanes quickly the new pcanes often loose many of their bottom leaves… and others remain but are spotted.
I think that if i left my spent fcanes in the patch until fall… my pcanes would be doomed. Dead plant foliage, 95-100 degree weather and rain… down here in the south… and things get funky fast.
What i have always done with my illini (20+ years now)… is when each fruiting lateral is done… i cut them out… when the entire cane is done i take it out. I get the old stuff out of the row as soon as possible… to make more room for the new primocanes.
When all the old has been removed… my pcanes are then getting plenty of sun… and I have 2.5 to 3 more months growing season left. I tip prune the pcanes, fertilize them and water some to get them to fill out nicely in the top with lots of fruiting laterals for next year.
This works well down here… may not up there.
@growjimgrow … wow nice crops of plums and peaches… impressive.
2 Likes
the floricanes up here stay green until early nov. it makes sense what youre doing. i may give it a try this summer to see the difference.
@steveb4 … the top half to 1/3 of my new raspberry pcanes remain green until first hard frost. They bloom and fruit Sept-Nov… but (the majority have lost many of the lower leaves to foliage issues)
My raspberry fcanes (the spent fcanes that just finished their spring / early summer crop) they start dieing as the last weeks worth of berries are ripening. They go down fast when fruiting nears the finish.
Then they are just a mass of dead canes and rotting leaves mixed in with my new pcanes.
I think the couple of weeks that they are in the bed together is what passes the foliage issues on to my primocanes.
When i remove the spent fcanes… my pcanes then get plenty of sun… it is then much less crowded in my bed.
For me that happens typically end of June.
I can then give my new pcanes some extra care… frertilizer, water (thru our hottest months). I tip prune them around 4 or 4.5 ft… and they send out a bunch of laterals from the tip prune (for fall crop).
I may try next year…leaving the bottom 2/3 or 1/2 of the spent fcanes in the bed until fall… but removing all the dead foilage and lateral branches from them.
That way they would not be depriving my new pcanes so much sunshine… and the bulk of the dead and rotting stuff would be ramoved… hopefully minimizing the funk to get passed on to my pcanes.
I will make no changes to my illini blackberry handling… it has been working great for 20+ years. They dedinately do not need any help from the spent fcanes to grow some big stout pcanes.
1 Like
This ripened over the weekend and we ate it while camping at the Northwest String Summit (a music festival near Portland, OR). This is what this cultivar looks like when completely ripe, with just the faintest yellow blush on green:
I didn’t take any photos of it cut because it was so messy, but here’s the seed and the seedling I found inside the seed (compass is included because it has inches & cm marked):
Looks mono-embryonic to me, so probably zygotic rather than a clone. Also looks like it might have some kind of black mold on it? Either way, it was a delicious mango and I’m excited to get scionwood from my brother to graft this on my greenhouse tree.
6 Likes
how’s that taste? it’s adorable
1 Like
Yes I love it. Acid and very sweet… 
1 Like
My Montmorency cherry tree was severely damaged by deer, but now is growing back it’s branches. What surprised me was the flower it gave this late on.
7 Likes
I planted what I thought was Black Beauty eggplant. The big teardrop shaped ones. But, instead we got little round ones! ? And they are bitter. I love the Japanese eggplants - and thank goodness, I planted some of those too. Yours look very nice, @Naeem.
1 Like
Everything looks GREAT! I have a Shiro graft on a Santa Rosa and it’s doing well . . . but no plums just yet. Yours look terrific.
1 Like
They are so good! It hasn’t rained here in about 2 weeks it seems and the peaches and plums are so sweet. We’ve been freezing the peaches and made BlackBerry cobbler. If I have time I will can some of the plums. Great year for blackberries too!
3 Likes
Pom, the best eggplants I ever grew were japanese, but they were white and lavender striped. They were very sweet and the skin was so thin you did not have to peel them. Perfect for moussaka!
2 Likes
