ive had good luck with pense. nice big plants with nice roots.
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All this interest in thornless plants! I need thorns or the squirrels take the berries and the deer eat the canes.
But i haven’t tried blackberries, because there were some wild canes heavily infested with orange rust when i moved in. I just have raspberries. If there are good (thorny) blackberries that are resistant to orange rust, maybe i should try them.
Flavor wise, Marion, Boysen, and Tay are some of my favorites.
Ginda, I understand your point. In the past I wanted the best possible fruit, even with thorns.
There are different deer in different areas and their tastes vary. My Columbian blacktail deer eat the shoots and leaves if even the highly invasive and highly thorny Himalayan blackberries. Not enough to kill them off by any means. Just at the sides and edges where I could reach for berries. Im glad your deer dont eat thorny plants.
As I age, Im less tolerant of thorns. I bleed more, my skin tears more easily, and I see, to experience pain more easily. Ten years ago I didnt mind thorns. Now I do.
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I have to agree with you on the thorns. I am only middle-aged, and I am finding the thorns more vexing than in my youth. The tips of the thorns always seem to break off and get infected now. I end up having to dig them out, leaving scabby craters all over my hands. Perhaps the thorny varieties taste better, but the thornless ones are good enough for me.
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It’s not that they don’t eat thorny plants, but that they completely consume the thornless ones. I also get a lot more squirrel and chipmunk damage on the less thorny cultivars.
It’s not that I want the best-tasting fruit, it’s that I’d like to have at least a meager harvest. The thornless ones are useless to me. Although my local wildlife enjoys them.
My Ponca berries just arrived from Indianaberry. I potted them up in leftover miraclegro and perlite I used to start some dahlia tubers indoors.
I just got a half dozen bare root Ponca. They are big, maybe thumb-thick stalks and football sized root balls. I don’t have any real experience planting bare-root plants, and my soil is pretty clay heavy. Anything I should mix in when planting them? Is there a good video on planting bare root plants someone can recommend? I can find a ton on YouTube, but many seem like they are about as clueless as I am.
I’m planning on digging down maybe 4-6 inches and mounding dirt over the rest of the root ball for better drainage.
Thanks!
Just make sure roots stays covered. You can mix compost or garden soil in with the native soil. Don’t do this with trees, but with shrubs they seem to like it. If you only use compost you will create a water hole and your plants will die. Mix it with native soil. It has to learn to live with it. When water hit a change in soil texture it stops. So the water will not drain from the hole you dug unless you mix in native soil to mimic the same texture. 50-50 mix is the most you can use. At least half has to be native soil.
Bare root plants should be planted right away. Some soak them first, but I feel this is unnecessary.
Really not much different than a potted plant.
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Also don’t feed them until they establish. About a month. Blackberries don’t need a lot of fertilizer. They are beasts. I mulch with just compost and feed them in the spring every year. This year I could not mulch, too many other things to do, so just fed them. Some suggest not mulching brambles, but I’m not sure why? Compost is not really mulch that won’t hurt. I think the concern is root rot. They do not do well with wet feet. Once established they are drought tolerant, but the plants have limits. I have killed a few from lack of water.
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Some of my new Ponca blackberries are starting to flower. Is it advisable to allow these new plants to produce fruit or should the flowers be removed so the plants can divert energy to root/leaf formation?
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If they were mine, I think I would let them fruit. The berries may not amount to much but I would still want to try one or two. Those canes will give way to the new primocanes after that. I’ve done that with other cultivars and the new primocanes grew just fine. However, Im an amateur, so I will defer to what others say.
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Well here are my Ponca from Pense. I they are not looking so good, but I suppose one or two or all three will recover. It’ partly my fault for ordering them so late, the the postal service is slow. Maybe now that they are in the ground, with some shade until that pale growth greens up, they will become perkier Ponca.
Meanwhile, my other varieties are looking nice so far this year. I can wait a couple of years on the Ponca.
With tree fruits I would say yes, but in my opinion and limited experience, blackberries are so vigorous it will have no effect to just let it do its thing.
My PAF did the same thing and it didn’t faze it.
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Received my five Ponca plants from Nourse yesterday. They were little plugs that were a bit root bound, but I was able to loosen and spread the roots when I potted them.
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Good sir, how do the flowerings of your Wyldewood and Bob Gordon overlap? Although I recall reading somewhere that they are meant to be good pollinators for each other, I find that ~ half of the BG cymes are kaput by the time the wyldewood flower buds open.
Yes, Bpb Gordon does seem to be a bit ahead of Wyldwood. But, even so, there is a fairly wide range of blooms and it seems to be enough for at least some set on Wyldwood. Here are some pics from a few days ago:
Wyldwood:
Bob Gordon:
Note that there are some unripe berries in the Bob Gordon cluster. I could wait longer, but this is what happens when I wait:
I’m not sure if uneven ripening is something that always happens with American elderberries or not. My only other elderberries are Samdal/Sampo (at different properties- no risk of cross pollination from a different town…).
The Bob Gordon blooms were very pretty, starting in late June and at full in the below pics from 7/9:
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had to pull wylewood and bob gordon. they grew beautifully but the berries never ripened in time and molded on the plant. my johns and a wild elder dont have that issue. does samdyl/ sampo ripen at the same time as your Americans?
I love to see other species discussed, but it would help if you open a separate thread instead of here in the Ponca thread.
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Anyone growing Ponca in a low chill area and have experience they can share?
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How has flavor yield, etc. been for those growing Ponca? There was a ton of excitement earlier. Maybe everyone’s plants are just too young?