I’ve seen a lot of interest/experience in this thread with Logans, but I’m wondering what the concensus is on Tayberries? A neighbor was giving away a plant and I put it in my community garden against the chain link fence around the outside. It is still small (hers looked sad and were growing in hard clay soil) and I don’t see any flower buds, but I can see two new primocanes coming up so hopefully I can get some good growth from it this year.
How do they grow/produce compared to Logans? Any thoughts on taste? I think they have basically the same or very similar parentage and I’ve heard them described as Logans that are significantly sweeter. Does anyone have good success with them and love them? If so, maybe I’ll tip-root mine and expand my planting.
Worth growing in backyard for personal instant consumption or making of jams… other than that it has its disadvantages which is why its not very popular and you will never see it in stores etc. Short growing season, soft, can be mushy in the heat… so has to be picked in early morning or evening…etc.
Tayberry has done very well for me. I planted it in the front yard because it is quite deer resistant. They are vigorous, productive, and taste good. The one down side is picking them. Have a glove or needle-nose pliers in your off hand to hold the stem while you remove the berries. It can be tricky to pick them without pricking your fingers.
you wouldnt happen to have a rooted tip you might want to trade for? im rooting some Colombia giant cuttings right now. once they root i could return the favor.
I can tip root it, but you might prefer to get a tissue cultured one that is certified to be free of viruses. I don’t think mine has a virus, but I can’t be certain.
I have not done anything to my logans so far this year… but this evening i gave them some attention. Above is what they looked like… just a mass of primocanes rushing out.
There were 18 primocanes up and out already…and some approaching 3 ft.
I cut most of those out… left 5… but may end up only using 4 of those. I gave them 50 lbs compost and some balanced organic fertilzer then a couple inches of mini pine bark mulch.
My problem will be… by the end of June they will completly cover my trellis… and they will keep growing until early November.
When you cut the growing tip off… they start sending out growth at the nodes along the canes. Lots of pruning will be done by fall.
Anyone here know anything about thimbleberry, just recently took some cuttings and trying to root them out. Is the flavor there? Are there different sub-types found in the wild that are exceptional?
Love your blackberry post. How is your Lawton Blackberry trial going? I’m looking for a bulletproof blackberry backup for those cold snap cane killing winters in Colorado.
Lawton (Seacor’s Mammoth) Delicious Thorny Floricane Blackberry Large Zone: 3-8
Yes there is a need for blackberries for folks that live in the cold as well as folks that live in warm climates.
Lawton gave me a few berries last year and they had the classic old timey blackberry taste…not super sweet but not super tart. It does sucker like crazy though. So buying one plant will get you a dozen or so pretty fast. Pretty obvious its a wild type that wants to survive. Berries in year 1 of my 2yo plants were pretty big…i would say that they will average bigger than a quarter consistantly. Likely bigger than that though.
Everett has a nice heirloom… and im growing it here as well. Not sure if he wants me or himself to spread it to folks… I think it has survived -50F or so in its lifetime.
I have Ebony Hardy from Canada… the old Ebony King that is very thorny that can even grow in parts of Alaska… and i have Illini Hardy going now as well.
I have some Eastern European varieties growing now that are used in commercial production. They survive -30F with ease. All are thorny.
I have talked to a guy in Utah that grew Illini Hardy and Prime Ark Freedom. He has a U-pick operation. He no longer grows Illini because people wont get near the thorns and dont want their kids near them… so he just cuts down Prime Ark to the ground and only grows primocane berries… so that is also an option since Utah is similar to CO in climate?
I dropped some Triple Crown in the ground and was surprised to see they all made it through the winter (Zone 3/4a). My thinking was to see if I could bury them under the snow, which I forgot to do. Had I buried them they would have been vole food. Now they are sitting in the spot I was planning on planting Nelson BB… so I guess I need a bigger garden. When it comes to planting stuff in the north, hardiness is kind of a starting point, if something dies there are always more things I want to grow that need a spot. We’ll see if I get berries though.
I have seen thimbleberry patches here in parking strips. One was more productive than I have seen in the wild, but still would have yielded less than a quart for a 50-square-foot patch.
In favorable conditions, thimbleberry will spread by roots and fill a large area, perhaps even faster than red raspberries.
im in the same zone and i overwintered triple crown, Chester and Colombian giant under the snow. voles got many canes of Chester but not all and Colombian giant and triple crown were untouched. should get a small crop off of them this summer. used heavy old fleece blankets besides the snow but i dont really think they needed it. my nelsons survived -40 with slight damage to the north west side of the canes above the snow but still fruited.
We started tayberries last year and got a few to taste. My husband declared that there was no point in growing anything else- the tayberries were perfect. I loved them too. I like sweet. They had a wonderfully complex aftertaste too.
I overwintered them in pots under a heap of leaves and they did very well. We had that cold Christmas too. I pulled them out about a month ago and they’ve been sitting on our deck. They’d been putting on a lot of growth but yesterday I discovered I have (raspberry?) sawfly and spent a lot of hours squishing. It seems like the eggs are mostly in the leaf stems of the older leaves that didn’t fall off over winter. Lesson learned I suppose.
The sawfly are also in my inground “probable Chester but was labeled as Navajo at Home Depot 20 years ago” and in 10 years that has never happened. The thornless boysenberry, Ouachita, and my Polka and Joan J raspberries are also affected. My pot of Black Satin sat in the middle of the fray and hasn’t shown any sign of sawfly damage yet.
Until this year I didn’t know raspberry sawfly was a thing. Gooseberry sawfly is also a problem and I was squishing them too yesterday. Definitely different species though. From the amount of damage thus far, I think they just got going in the last day or so.
Regarding the taste of Tayberries, they tasted so good that my husband didn’t get annoyed that I was out in the backyard squishing threats to the tayberries while he dealt with all of the crazy bedtime routines in our house solo. I don’t think that is an official level of measurement for the rest of the world but around here, that means a lot.
Now that my Caddo and Ponca are sending up the new primocanes for the season, I’m noticing they are doing it very differently. They are in different spots, with different amounts of sun, different soil, etc., so maybe that is part of the reason, but I’m curious if it is just how these two grow.
Basically, with my Caddo plants (4) all the primocanes are coming up right at the existing crowns, within an inch or so of the current canes. For Ponca (5 plants) the canes are coming up a few feet away from the crowns. I do see some new shoots emerging from a bud an inch or two up the existing f-canes, but I don’t think I can consider those primocanes. If this keeps up, Ponca is going to spread a lot more over time than Caddo.
