THE MAGIC OF GARDENING
Meet Me at the Blackberry Patch Most folks that grew up in the South of my generation (Baby Boomer) or older have spent some time this time of year literally picking their way through a patch of wild blackberries. You younger folks need that experience to toughen you up just a little. Nowadays we have cultivated blackberries planted on farms in rows both managed and trellised for easy harvesting. We miss out on a lot in this new way of growing blackberries. There is less chance of getting ticks or chiggers and much less chance of stepping on a snake. This is not to mention the dreaded thorns that require great skill to avoid. However, one of the things I hear most from old timers who have forgotten all the negatives is that cultivated blackberries don’t taste as good as the wild types. This is changing primarily due to the efforts of gifted plant breeders. My days of wandering through wild blackberry patches are quickly growing to an end, but thankfully we now have some great cultivated thornless varieties of this prized summertime fruit. We can’t grow good raspberries or gooseberries, but we are in a great area to grow some of the best blackberries in the world. Once upon a time we thought the holy grail would be the development of a thornless variety, but 54
Cooperative Farming News
over time, breeders not only achieved that goal but developed more disease resistance, better flavor and even fall-fruiting varieties. Blackberries are biennial in growth habit. They produce a vegetative cane the first season that fruits the next year followed by those canes dying. The vegetative canes are called primocanes and the next year the same canes bear fruit and are called floricanes. This was an easy way of differentiating between the new canes coming up in the early to midsummer from the ones that had fruit on them at the same time. The plant breeders have confused things once again by developing a unique fall-fruiting type of plant called primocane fruiting blackberries. The first time I heard that phrase I thought it was an oxymoron. By definition, fruit form on floricanes not primocanes. But, oh no, the plant breeders threw us a curve and came up with varieties that fruit in the fall on the primocanes that just came up earlier in the summer. To make matters even more confusing, these same primocane fruiting varieties can be managed to fruit as floricanes the next year rather than in the fall. The way this is accomplished is to keep tipping the new growth back all through the summer to prevent flow-
