Wanted to bring up something seldom discussed about growing fruit or any crop in monoculture. If you have grown a garden or fruit as many of us have over a very long time you will learn things no book will tell you. As an example in nature weeds correct the imbalances in the soil. Insects are natures security guards. Birds, reptiles, and animals correct imbalances as well. If there are to many rabbits the coyotes , owls, hawks, bobcats etc. eat them. If there are to many mice, birds, rats etc the snakes eat them. They all eat each other. As humans we tip the balance in our own favor. Once fruit bushes such as blackberries grow in one spot for many years we fertlize them or they die. Blackberries are just another weed correcting an imbalance. Once the imbalance of excess nutrients is countered then the bush dies. Fires, droughts,floods etc. Are natures mechanisms of control.
Gardening is essentially an endless battle against “natural balance” to serve the advantage of the gardener against an array of species seeking their own advantage. Of course, in this struggle, we have allies who might share a portion of our interests, such as beneficial insects that feed on our enemies and we can succeed with less labor if we use nature when it aligns with our interests and steer it instead of trying to block it, but gardening often seems like humans pitted against nature. I don’t believe a “natural balance” involves a human population exceeding 8 billion, which is largely the result of massive agricultural expansion via fossil fuels and modern chemistry. Farmland is not wilderness and farming is not “natural”.
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Fruit growers can also become victims of their own vanity.
The obsession with pristine yards, cleaning up everything during Fall… zero weeds… sometimes zero grass.
All of the tips and tricks of how to kill all grasses is vanity.
Colored mulch is vanity.
Removing all leaves is vanity.
How many folks have killed their own plantings accidently by weedeating… pure vanity.
So much effort to make sure that nothing lives there except for themselves and their precious plantings.
A monoculture in my mind is an area where only humans live or allowed to live.
Just the things that live in an untouched grassy field is mind boggling.
The effort it takes to keep that same field mowed and pristine in the eyes of the land owner…is even more mind boggling. Time, money…effort spent to stop life and habitat… is ignorant of life on Earth…is vain and selfish.
Maybe not in your “area” but how much of the KS economy is based on supplying grain for our booming cities? KS lost population because fossil fuel driven machinery now does most of the work on huge corporate or inherited farms. People tend to like to be near mountains and/or large bodies of water more than on the flat planes. The rich folks who own the big farms often live in places like NYC or coastal CA. Bill Gates owns more farm land than any other American. I wonder how much KS acreage that includes and how much time he’s ever spent on one of his farms.
Once the dimension of a Supreme Being is erased from the human conscience or from society, lots of peculiar ideas result. Basically, everyone does as they please, or as the more powerful in society push them to do.
Interesting but I’ll let it go for now…
We also invented netting!
Maybe where you live blackberries decline, here the blackberries expand and thrive. If it weren’t for the damned spotted wing drosophila, free blackberries are just a given here. They don’t seem to need any fertilizer other than what the environment provides, and our soil is generally nitrogen deficient.
Growing 30 brix stone fruit to harvest is not a natural thing to do.
In my area, blackberries severely deplete the soil in 5- 12 years. Most plants do deplete soil. After that time the berries move over a few feet leaving behind beautiful black soil where there was only clay. Weeds grow in an area until an imbalance has been corrected.
I think you are mistaken. What often depletes soil is when minerals are removed with the crop and annual crops are what tends to deplete the soil, both because of what the harvest takes away and especially when soil is tilled which vastly accelerates the mineralization of organic matter.
Brambles stabilize the soil with their fibrous root systems and that black soil is the result of the build up of OM, which means the soil isn’t depleted, it’s been enriched.
Here the main problem that destroys brambles is viruses. Maybe that is what happens there as well. Or maybe you mean something else when you say depleted and some mechanism I am unaware of.
In my opinion your right in a way about the soil being enriched. Blackberries here can be grown in pure clay. They send out suckers by the hundreds enriching the soil with lots of organic material. This process occurs for years. Soon the mineral rich clay in that spot is no longer clay at all but has now became black loosened soil. The blackberry has depleted it’s favorite nutrients from the soil leaving behind a rich soil that can readily grow pears,persimmons or other delicious fruits. The blackberries row have moved over a few feet to the clay soil they like… The dead brown canes simply need mowed off but no blackberries will grow there anytime soon. They are incredibly good for the soil. Rabbits ,birds etc. Live in the bushes.
What nutrients have you found depleted by blackberries?
The clay soil turned into rich black soil. Calcium levels in the soil certainly drop with growing most fruits eg. Blackberries, apples etc…
IMO, it is far more likely that diseases build up in the soil that kill the blackberries. If it was just nutrient removal, you could add supplements and blackberries would again grow in that soil. Suggest doing due diligence Clark, this is highly likely a case where an alternative explanation is correct.
sugar and use by date increases at cost of vitamins and minerals.fruit and veg store bought has fallen 10-30% in nutrition in last 60 years.
30 brix peaches has nothing to do with sell by dates in stores… Not sure where your comment was based.
Calcium levels tend to be higher in the upper few inches of soil here, probably because they are higher in OM, not because plants add or subtract the calcium, but because they concentrate more nutrients, including calcium, in the upper few inches of soil as a result of the self mulching that pulls nutrients from deeper levels to the soils surface. Worms and other organisms pull those nutrients mostly into the top few inches of soil as part of their digestive processes. I believe this process of top soil enrichment occurs over decades and even centuries, not in a matter of a few years.
Where our soils in the northeast are acidic they tend to get increasingly so as you go deeper, presumably because of the higher OM content (and calcium) in the top few inches of soil. KS has prairie soil whose species create a much deeper top soil than the soil here, which was created by trees rather than the herbaceous perennials of the prairies.
Years of agriculture that involves tillage and the removal of more OM than is returned and a lot of erosion during flooding rains has damaged much of the ag soil in the Midwest. The plants themselves are not responsible- they don’t remove nutrients from the sites where they grow, besides what they hold above the soil at any given time. Human activity does- both by way of their ag methods and via the harvests.
It occurs to me, that an explanation for your observations might possibly be your strong winds are blowing away the leaves of the blackberry plants, but if that was the case, the soil wouldn’t become darker, unless their roots are doing that job all by themselves, but if the soil is becoming darker it is also becoming higher in plant nutrients, probably including calcium.
Check the pH of your black-berry created soil and see if the pH is lower than nearby soil that has not hosted blackberries. Than you will have something.
As stated the blackberries grow fine a few feet over. If it was a disease problem which is not the case the disease would still be present. Soil is frequently farmed out in my area. The dustbowl and decades of intense grain farming have taken a heavy toll on our soil. Suggest doing your due diligence on soil on the prarie caused by erosion. Pond muck soil soil cleared from the bottom of the ponds sustains blackberries twice as long. I grow over 2 acres of blackberries over 30 years how many are you growing? My family grew the same blackberries since my grandpa was a young man. We know the behavior of the plants. In nutrient rich areas the plant sustains longer. Every plant out there takes what it wants from the soil this is not new. Every plant wants something different. A fertilizer developer maker like @Richard could tell you this. The point of not adding soil fertilizer is called long term crop rotation. The blackberries are a soil correcter and wildlife refuge. We are victims of our own prosperity, every fruit takes nutrients out of the ground making them available to us to eat.
Clark, all that is being asked for is a full explanation of what you know and don’t know. You can spend a lifetime growing something and not understand all the mechanisms involved- as I can attest from my own experience and misunderstandings- and I have 55 years under my belt of drawing my living from the soil one way or another. You claim the blackberries are depleting the soil of nutrients but haven’t explained how you know that is the issue.
Here, viral infections build up in the plants and you can plant blackberries nearby diseased ones and they grow just fine, until they eventually succumb… usually. Viruses move via aphids and other vectors and that can take time. But even that isn’t based on complete certainty of what is going on with my own plants in my own orchard, but it at least matches what I’ve read in the literature.
I simply cannot understand how the blackberries are committing suicide in your orchard and you haven’t provided a full explanation. How are they removing the calcium… where is it going?
I have apple mosaic virus on one apple tree in my entire orchard and so far symptoms have only showed up in that one tree, and it is touching branches with two other apple trees with many others nearby. I manage another orchard with the same story.