It’s possible to root cuttings. Plenty of You Tube video where folks demonstrate their process.
We rooted a lot of softwood cuttings with intermittent mist but our success rate was not great… Good solution for a lot of cuttings but for 50 plants I would lay some of the canes on the ground and cover with dirt or a rock like suggested earlier… Works great and not much work.
Most Blackberries send out root suckers away from the main canes too which are easy to dig. Some of these canes come up in bad locations and will probably need to be cut to the ground anyway.
I have about 100 Ponca root suckers to dig up this year. One negative, digging up a root sucker cuts the root which means next year several more root suckers will sprout. Whack-a-mole anyone?
Root cuttings would be your best bet to get the most plants. You can purchase root cuttings online, probably the cheapest method to get a lot of plants.
LSU has posted this video on FB and youtube for the public. Do not post this on the Rasp and Blackberry FB group… they are censoring all propagation talk. But feel free to share it on just about any other group… i guess thats where we are with education nowadays.
This works for just about every cane fruit except for Illini Hardy Blackberry which just does not root from root cuttings.
She says that this variety is seedless…which is an error she means thornless.
I like to do my root cuttings in the late Fall… and not have to water them at all or even fool with them once under soil or mulch. You can also do it in early spring… but i just prefer not to.
She doesnt mention that the roots should probably be stratified by cold and also need to callus…but as most videos go they only show the before and not the after.
I do not see the sense in doing root cuttings in Tshirt weather and as she mentioned need watering every day…so likely she did it in summer…which i think is not good for the plant or the process.
Best case scenario is that by late fall you will have a tiny plant that will need to be protected or likely get zapped in cold weather…which makes the whole process a waste of time.
Barring all of that its worth watching to see how easy it is to do… and with a tub like that you could easily get many many hundreds of root cuttings per year and keep repeating the cycle if you so wished.
So do a root cutting in late fall… plant it wherever you want and sleep well knowing that it will send up a cane or a few and possibly reach the top wire or longer by the following late Fall…and possibly fruit for you the following year. If not at least you have a good crown formed and many years of fruits to follow.
once your plants go dormant, take your cuttings and plant them in ground where you want them. i scratch down to the cambium on the lower part then push into the soil leaving 1 or 2 buds exposed. mulch around it and give water. that’s it. it will put down roots over winter and grow quickly when spring comes. ive had very good luck with alot of things doing it this way. im sure root cuttings work as well but if i can get a plant without having to dig, im all for it. my clay soil holds water well. maybe why ive had as much luck doing it that way here. maybe different in other types of soil.
If you want to start them somewhere else, just do this in a small pot with soil in it and bury 2-4" with a rock on top of the soil. It keeps the moisture in as well. I start them in late July and then plant them out in late August.
@Wolfmanjack could you please let me know who or where I could find cuttings? Thank you @krismoriah Thank you. I love the video, perfect. This is one of my favorite sites because there’s so many people with great knowledge. I don’t have the problem of whack a mole, yet.lol
Womack nursery, penseberry are two that I know of although they may not have the specific variety you are looking for. You could wait for your plants to go dormant, dig them up and get your root cuttings that way. As I see it you won’t get very much top growth from your plants at this point in the year anyway. Let the roots grow all winter and then dig those puppies up. Get your cuttings and plant them out and replant the mothers. The two plants you have won’t give you very many berries in the spring so not much lost there. You could also try tip rooting a plant and let that one grow roots over the winter and take root cuttings from it.
Sorry I was confusing what plants you have with someone else’s thread. If you have mature plants then you can dig some of their roots up and make your propagation that way, it may effect the yield this spring but the plant will recover just fine.
@Lukeott … the post below shows some examples of propagating raspberries from root shoots and tip rooting.
If the blackberry varieties you have are prone to producing root shoots… and you have had them planted 2-3 years… you should be seeing evidence ot that… the roots simply run out 2 3 4 5 ft from the initial crown and send up a shoot.
Those shoots can normally simply be dug up / separated from the mother crown… and transplanted in another location.
You may have to take care of them well, baby them a bit for a few weeks after digging them up… give them some time in indirect light… then part sun (morning sun)… before planting them out in a full sun location.
I have 6 of the older variety… illini hardy… and can testify to what Kris said… they simply do not root shoot… they do send up new canes very near the mother crown… but in over 20 years that I have had them… never once had a shoot come up more than 3-4 inches from the mother crown.
Most of the modern day varieties do send up root shoots quite some distance from the mother crown. I have some Ouachita blackberries and they will send up root shoots a good 3 4 5 ft from the mother crown.
Very easy to simply dig those up and … perhaps baby them a bit… and then plant anywhere you want.
If you want to do cane cuttings you can in September (ish) and pot them up. If you have the standard 1 gallon nursery pots the clear gallon bags from walmart etc fit perfectly over the rim of the 1 gallon pot and make an excellent mini greenhouse. Doing it at this time will allow several months of rooting before the cold. Leave the leaves on the nodes for transpiration. This is for primocanes that are the size of pencil give or take near the tips of laterals etc. They are no longer floppy…so semi hardwood… 1 bud with a scrape directly opposite the bud seems to work well for me. I have also had good results pinching the bottom below the node with pliers… both of these seem to induce callusing better than not.
The gallon pot mini greenhouses work very well for me with leaves left on… and on the contrary i had alot of failure with doing cuttings later after leaf drop. About 30 percent or less rooting after the semi hardwood turns to more of a hardwood.
Not very scientific…just trial and error here on my end.
FYI @TNHunter i used this method for Illini Hardy and i have near 100 percent rooting by cane cuttings. I only did a small trial…but going forward i will do it this way.
After i know i have good rooting by November(ish) i let them overwinter outside so that i do not have to baby or worry about them… and by Spring i usually have a well rooted cutting that is ready for transplant. This year i planted rooted cane cuttings in the row… and mulched heavily… I will check on them in March or so.
No need for any nutrients in the medium… i have been mostly rooting things in sand mixed with woodchips… and have had wonderful results tip rooting in just woodchips with alot of leaf litter in the mix. I did have some molds and rot last year with cuttings in ProMix… i think it holds too much moisture.
4 cents each… also work well for fig pops etc… or trading plants or cuttings with others.
@krismoriah thanks for the information. It’s very helpful. Good to know about the bags from Walmart, you can’t beat.04 a bag. I’ve got quite a few gallon pots. There’s another question about black berries. I think I read somewhere about if you plant thornless berries near berries that have thorns that it somehow makes the thornless to have thorns. Is there any truth to that??
There are some older cultivars and maybe some new thornless varieties that will revert to spines and prickles with root cuttings. Nothing to do with planting in proximity though…at least to my knowledge.
So its possible with vole damage or root damage to have a sucker that is spined… but its rare… and maybe those cultivars arent in the market any more. I dont think any varieties in the trade nowadays have reversion.
Its more likely at some point to have a seedling from a bird or animal dropping that will be a mutation of its parent…which could result in a spined variety even though the seed was from a spineless cultivar.
I have a seedling from a thornless boysenberry going now that is ultra thorny… i have no idea what kind of berries it will have… i just know that its not growing like a trailing boysenberry and doesnt even have the small spines of a thorned boysen…its a mutation. Could be terrible…could be awesome… thats just how nature works.
If you want to nerd out…this is a good article explaining the process and science of breeding thornlessness and in some cases there may be a chance of reverting.
Most everything that has happened with thornlessness is due to a sport of Loganberry found in 1933 ‘American Thornless Loganberry’… if not for that… hard to know if we would have thornless cane fruits today…alot of breeding has resulted from that seedling.
Didnt Burbank breed the original thornless blackberry back in the early 20th century?
Someone on the forum explained some time back that such thornless cultivars are chimeras, with the roots being genetically one (thorny) individual, the stem tissue another (thornless). I’ve never had such an issue digging suckers from my thornless blackberries
hobilus, read the article krismoriah linked. It is very well explained. krismoriah posted a couple of inaccuracies, technically thornless Evergreen was the source of most modern thornless varieties.
