These are the 2 varieties I picked up today. Also couldn’t resist the pineberries. My daughter thought they looked so cool. The pack comes with 10 pineberries along with 10 red strawberries for pollination.
I was about to any my raspberries and blackberries today when I thought I better ask the question here first. I filled my trellis like r and amended with humus manure, sawdust and wood chips to condition the soil a bit since its somewhat clayey. Afterward I laid down some weed fabric and began to mark my holes where I wanted to start the plants. Then I wondered to myself if weed fabric is a good idea? Would it stop raspberries from suckering? I know raspberries propogate themselves by suckering. My thinking is that the raspberries and blackberries would blast right through it. But maybe not.
Thoughts?
Well, I don’t know that they could punch through fabric- some of it seems pretty tough. But they would try, and when you see the suckers pushing up against the fabric you could slit that spot with a knife to let the sucker, aka new primocane come through
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Speedster, I put heavy cardboard covered with about four inches of arborist wood chip mulch around my raspberries. I did not till first, just dug the pasture in the spots for the brambles. By the end of the season the cardboard was disintegrating, so the suckers came right through it all. Unfortunately, some of the thistles and tougher weeds did, too, but they were fairly easy to pull through the mulch. The second year I added another layer of mulch, plus new cardboard only in the walkways, but had to weed again among the plants and suckers. Some landscape fabric or even carpet might work well to keep the walking trails weedfree, at least, but I am too cheap to buy anything.
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Red raspberries generally come up randomly (e.g.suckering) but black and purple raspberries generally do not. You could use weed fabric around them OK. I purchased some Brandywine this year too. I have Glencoe and Royalty Purple raspberries but they were hit pretty hard last year.
I’ll share some of my bramble experiences here in Iowa.
I don’t grow Triple Crown but have heard its a monster, like 3" diameter canes, spacing 8’+ apart. My 5 varieties of thornless blackberries are in the greenhouse as they are only marginally hardy here. Prime Ark Freedom is my most vigorous (but nothing like what I’ve read about Triple Crown). I use 4’ spacing. In the orchard I have a couple Prime Ark 45s and they have produced well for me - our last 2 mild winters the floricanes have survived and produced (-11F and -15F). I’ll try some PA Freedom out there.
I’m interested to try Josephine raspberry now that I’ve read good reviews. My favorites for flavor are Caroline (which has a unique, candy-like tartness to me) and Anne, which is milder than reds, but has an interesting peach undertone. However, overall I’m a huge fan of Prelude, which are very vigorous and productive for me, with the earliest summer crop and a huge fall crop as well. The berries are large with good sweet rasp flavor and just tremendously vigorous and productive - probably at least twice the yearly production of any other I grow - the only other everbearing I have is Taylor and don’t get a fall crop from it (and haven’t been wowed by its summer crop). My primocane rasps are cut down in winter to focus on their fall crop.
Cheers,
Kirk
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How do you grow your blackberries in your greenhouse, in pots, in the ground?
In the ground. They seemed to like it their first year and are coming on like gangbusters so far this spring.
It is nice to hear that they do well. I am hoping to do the same thing here, we are exceptionally cold in the winter but Chester survives when the canes are laid down and covered with snow. Our summers are too short for the fruit to ripen but I have a greenhouse that extends the season for 2 extra months, which would be ample time for them to ripen. Blackberries would be a wonderful addition.
Ursula,
Zone 2B, brrr! Is your greenhouse heated at all? If not, I think you’ll have to lay down the canes and cover with straw or something to protect them without the insulating snow cover. You could also look into the primocane blackberries as they fruit on first year canes and are a bit hardier since only the roots have to survive winter…but they ripen even later than Chester, I believe.
Lucky for you USask has been breeding lots of prairie-hardy apples, cherries and berries in recent years. Do you grow haskaps/honeyberries? Mine are only a couple years old so I have yet to taste one. I should be eating my first Carmine Jewel cherries this summer, though!
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I’m north of 53 too (Edmonton, 53.5 degrees North latitude). I’ve grown Chester outdoors for at least a half-dozen years, and it seems to do fine as long as I take the canes down each fall and cover them with a thick layer of straw or leaves (straw is better). They ripen late here, starting in late August, with peak production in September, and stragglers in October. Obviously any early autumn frost can destroy the entire season, which would be a serious concern if grown outside of a city where the city “heat-island” can keep those early frosts away. Most years I get about 500 ripe berries from my sprawling plant, but in 2016, in the unusual El Nino year, my plant produced over 1,500 ripe berries. We are still using the excess berries that were frozen to blend for smoothies and such.
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Don, well hello, you are almost directly west of me as the crow flies. The 53rd parallel is 2 miles south of here.
My greenhouse is heated only in the spring and fall with a wood boiler, extending the season for me on each end. I have both zone 3 and 4 grapes in there and they have done exceptionally well thru the winter when laid down and a 6 to 8 inch cover of peat moss. I neglected my Frontenac Gris last fall and expected to have to remove it this spring, yet, lo and behold it has leafed out right to the tip. That is one strong plant to survive the winter unheated, unmulched and with zero snow cover! My Suffolk seedless is just starting to set blossom.
I am hoping to do the same with blackberries, I wonder how many plants I would need?
My U os S cherries did not make the winter, but I do however have Evans and Nanking, both of which fruit and a young Montmorency that has not fruited yet.
I don’t grow the Haskaps I would rather have a wild blueberry lol. We do have a local u-pick but the birds eat them before they are ripe so that can be a problem.
It sounds like your greenhouse set up is ideal for extending your season. I have Valiant grapes (rated zone 2 I believe) and they give lots of seedy but tasty fruit each year that keep us stocked with juice and jelly. I tried making them into wine one year, but bleah. This year I’ve ordered a Sommerset seedless grape from Veseys – it’s probably pushing the zone here but I have to try and they say it is an early ripener which is a necessity around here. Maybe you are growing it?
As for blackberries, they get huge so I think one plant will be all you need unless you have a really really big greenhouse. The canes get about 10 feet long or more for me each year. I cover them for winter but usually they die back so that only the first 3 feet survive and the growth from that is what gives me my 500 berries that summer. In the 2015-2016 El Nino winter, about 6 feet of each cane surivived and I got 3 times the berry production. If you can keep all 10 feet alive in your greenhouse, be prepared to be swamped with berries! Fortunately Chester is self-pollinating, so one plant will allow pollination.
Some pics. My Chester plant last year, August 20. The fence is 6 feet tall.
A closer up of the plant, showing how heavily they yield.
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They are beautiful and much larger than I had anticipated. I have two plants from last year that about 3 feet of cane survived, I am planning to move them as soon as this blinkin’ snow goes and the frost comes out of the ground. Maybe I better just move one. The greenhouse is 16ft. by 24ft. fairly large but it is getting full of fruiting plants.
For grapes I have
Sommerset Seedless
Vanessa
Trollhaugen
Suffolk Seedless
Frontenac Gris
The temperature in the greenhouse definitely gets down to -40C or colder mostly the same as the outside temperature. With no heat, plastic is not a great insulator. So if you are willing to lay down the grapes and cover them, you should have success with Sommerset. I plant at a 45 degree angle and in the fall coil up the canes I want to keep, fix the coil to the ground with a landscape pins and cover. I don’t want all the spare peat moss in my soil so I fill a big bag with the moss and plonk it on top. This method allows me less area to have to pile peat moss on, instead of a long, long cane it is just a small pile.
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Those sound like useful tricks, I will give them a go. When you plant at a 45 degree angle I presume you are planting deep so that some of the cane survives even if the stuff above ground does not? If so, how deep below ground surface do you set the crown of the grape vine?
I am not sure it is really deep I never paid close attention. I put them in a hole as recommended and then just lean the plant over in the hole. But I guess if you think of it, this would mean that more of the main trunk would be under the soil.
I will take the time to see if I can find you the link to a horticulturist on the prairies who wrote about planting and growing grapes with this method. Her pruning advice and training of grapes grown this way is helpful. I remember that she noted that it was important to keep the main trunk horizontal as it gets large and woody making bending impossible as it ages. It is the resulting vines that get trellised up and then taken down and covered for the winter.
OK, it sounds like what I do for my hybrid tea roses. They are not hardy here in zone 3a, but I planted the rose crowns 8" or 12" below ground level, and on a 45 degree angle, plus add a winter cover. Most winters things kill right to ground level, then grow vigorously from new underground shoots, and produce lots of rose blossoms on 3 foot tall plants from late June to Fall.
Well, I learn something new here all the time. I had some tea roses, never even thought of doing this with them or that it would help. OH DEAR, now I am not going to be able to resist the tea rose isle.
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@speedster1, I was wondering how all yer rasps and blackberries are doing. I know you got yer rasps from Tractor Supply and Indiana Berry. You mentioned that your triple crown black was struggling?
I planted 4 rasps about 3 weeks ago, 3 from TS and one from Lowe’s. No signs of life yet, but I know they can take their time.
I added some more rasps last night from IB. I picked up some summer reds- Prelude, Killarney and AAC Eden, and a couple everbearers- Double Gold and Caroline. They’re supposed to be here in a couple weeks.
We also added 25 of each of Earliglow and Jewel strawberries from Nourse as well. They’ll be here next week. We’ll put them in the backyard plot with the mystery strawberries we planted last year.
I hope that’ll be it for our fruit plants this year!
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The rasps are doing well. I’ll try to get a picture today if it stops raining. The blacks however are not. The last I looked than them the PAF seems runted out and the triple crown shows zero signs of life. Mines been in the ground for I guess about 7 weeks now. The blackberries came from Henry Fields.
On a side note, when I planted the rasps the roots on Anne were huge and I had to trim them a bit when I put them in the ground. I took those very small roots and put them in starter pots and they have started to grow out. Free raspberry plants.
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