Raspberries and blackberries are one of my favorite berries to grow and eat at home but most people shy away from growing brambles because of the thorns. Let’s explore the pros and cons of growing brambles at home and why I think you should consider an easy pick bramble patch for your backyard. At the end I will show you how to setup an easy bramble patch in your backyard.
Cons
I know what you are thinking, but what about the prickers? Those thorns hurt if you’re not careful and forget about the kids trying to help with harvest! The next con is disease and pest pressure. In the backyard/small scale setup this isn’t the problem it can be in mass plantings. However unkempt and unruly patches can be a harbinger for diease resulting in plant and harvest loses.
I am not going to sugar coat it, in many places of the country people view wild blackberries and raspberries as unruly weeds that need to be eradicated. They spread and aim to take over tree lines up and down back country roads all over this country. Task forces are even setup to spray and eliminate these pesky plants but to no avail. Oh no a plant that grows wild, produces delicious fruit, and is so hardy it fills a roadside niche that most weaker plants only die in! Whatever will we do? If you couldn’t tell that was my attempt at sarcasm, it’s oblivious that this is a pro bramble article, you won’t get any apologizes here.
Pros
First I love the taste, who doesn’t, of a perfectly ripe raspberry or blackberry. It is nearly impossible to find a perfectly ripe raspberry in your local store, more on why later. Unless it came from your local farmer I find it difficult to find a good store bought raspberry. Berries from the store are expensive and usually shipped in from another hemisphere. Cost of buying inadequate tasting berries versus growing your own strengthens the brambles case. Next is the fact that those expensive berries shipped in from another continent usually go bad (moldy, mushy, or just plain tasteless) within a day or two after getting them from the grocery store. Store shelf life on these berries is awful. Picked from your backyard a blackberry or raspberry will keep for nearly a week in your refrigerator. Chances are they won’t last that long before getting eaten, usually my kids don’t let them get inside the house before being eaten. My last pro is that with advances in breeding some blackberry varieties are now being touted as largely thornless. To recap growing backyard brambles can provide you with delicious fruit from hardy plants with no thorns that you have picked at the peak of freshness. Now lets dive deeper into preparing your patch!
Picking your Site
Picking the right spot for your brambles is essential to getting productive plants for years to come. Brambles are hardy plants but if you put them in a challenging growing environment your harvests and fruit quality might suffer. Chose a well-drained sandy loam soil to plant into. Brambles will have difficulty thriving in poorly drained soils. Wet spots with high water tables and clay soils will cause your brambles to suffer. Brambles that suffer from wet feet (plant roots in poorly drained soil which stays constantly wet) will often get diseased, die, or have very poor production.
Flat or gently sloped sites are best for brambles. Stay away from frost pockets which develop at the bottom of valleys. Planting in frost pockets is asking for late frosts to kill your delicate blossoms meaning no or very little fruit that year.
Prepping your Soil
Before you plant your brambles you will want to prep your site. Commercial growers will often do a soil test on their site before they plant. Soils tests commonly check for pH (5.5-6.5 is ideal to grow brambles) and organic matter (over 3-4% will keep your plants happy). Most backyard growers won’t go this far but those who seriously love their berries will! Lime can be used to raise pH and Sulphur is used to reduce pH. Adding organic matter can be achieved by using compost, animal manure, or by planting cover crops.
Finally you will want to do your best to eliminate any weeds in your future patch. There are many ways to accomplish this. A few options are as follows: tilling, planting cover crops, mulching, spreading wood chips, solarizing, tarping, or laying cardboard over your future patch will all help to keep back the weeds. Some of these options like cover cropping and tarping are best done a few months prior to planting while tilling, mulching, and laying cardboard can be done right before planting.
In an ideal world my site prep would be solarizing in late summer before planting, cover crop in fall, mulch/woodchips over winter and then plant my brambles in the spring. Knowing that life always throws us for a loop I am happy to tarp overwinter, maybe solarize in early spring, plant brambles in spring and mulch with cardboard topped with straw or woodchips.
Planting your Berries
Now that we have picked and prepped our site we are ready to plant our brambles. In large plantings spacing between plants is essential. In smaller backyards where our goal is to get the most fruit from that small group of plants we don’t have to adhere to such strict spacing guidelines. To get the most out of your bramble harvest I recommend adding a trellis system. Before I lose you it is a simple 2 post structure that will make harvest a breeze. Think less painful and more fruit than ever before, it makes harvest so easy even my young kids join me now. This video taken at Stone Barns in New York shows one type of bramble trellis you can use for your backyard patch.
You are now ready to plant. For the best survivability of your brambles plant them while they are dormant, spring or fall. Your site is prepped, if you mulched or laid cardboard now is the time to carefully move that to the side. Dig your planting hole slightly larger than your plants root ball. Carefully spread out your roots and backfill your hole with the same soil you dug previously. Plant your bramble at the same depth or slightly deeper than it was planted at the nursery. Pat down the soil around your plant and water in thoroughly to ensure no air pockets in the planting hole. Repeat until all plants are in the ground.
Trellis Setup
Plant your brambles in a hedgerow style. If you are tight on space plant them 1.5-2 feet apart. Be sure to give at least a foot or 2 for our trellis supports at the end of each row. Now we need to construct two “T” trellises, which are exactly what they sounds like. The ‘T’ trellis posts will go at both ends of your bramble row. Affix a cross to the top of your post to make a lower case “t”. The cross piece should be about 3.5 feet long and mounted at 3.5-4 feet in height. I like to use round posts that I have harvested from my property if I have them, if not 4×4 posts for posts and 2×4’s or 2×6’s for the “t” work great. Depending on how long your bramble row is you might need additional tees for extra support.
Wire can be managed in several ways. The cheapest way is to wrap your wire around your end cross posts. If you are using more than two support posts you can drill holes in the cross posts and thread your wire thru. To keep your wire tight you can use eye hooks and a turnbuckle on each end of the cross pieces. This will keep your wire from sagging even with the fruit packed brambles adding extra weight. This trellis system trains your brambles to grow upright instead for spreading into an unmanageable thicket. Your end result will be upright plants that make for easy picking with limited prickers!
This row style trellis system allows for quicker more productive picking while limiting the sharp prickers than can scare off even the hungriest young berry picker. Best of all more fruit is picked than is missed and some berries might actually make it all the way to the house before you and your family gobble them up!
Do you have a bramble patch in your backyard? Or are you considering planting one? Is it setup in a row style or with a trellis? We would love to hear from you, leave a comment below or send us an email.