Photo: James H. Miller & Ted Bodner, Southern Weed Science Society, Bugwood.org — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 3 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Sweet-tart, blackberry-like, seedy; good fresh, small crop.
- Hardiness
- Zone 3–8
- Habit
- Groundcover
- Edible part
- Seed, Fruit
- Ripens
- June–July (earlier than blackberry)
- Mature size
- Trailing groundcover 20–40 cm tall, the canes running 1–3 m along the ground and tip-rooting freely
- Light
- Full sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate, dry open ground
- Native range
- Central and eastern North America, from the Great Plains east to the Atlantic and from southeastern Canada south to Florida and Texas — the most widespread native dewberry, typical of dry open woods, fields, roadsides and forest edges.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Fast, ground-hugging spread — trailing canes can extend several metres in a season, rooting as they go.
- Spacing
- 90 cm (35 in) apart — about 1.2 per m² (1.1 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Compound leaves, usually with 3 (occasionally 5) coarsely toothed leaflets, on slender, prickly, trailing stems 2.4–4.6 m long, with shorter erect flowering shoots to about 1.2 m.
- Root system
- Fibrous, perennial crown with trailing canes that root freely at the tips, letting a single plant spread outward into a broad, low mat over a few seasons.
- Fruit description
- Black aggregate berry 1–1.5 cm, ripening early summer, sweet when fully black and dropping readily — smaller and seedier than a cultivated blackberry but among the better wild dewberries for eating fresh.
- Propagation
- Primarily by tip-layering — trailing cane tips root readily where they touch soil, producing new plants that can be dug and separated; also increases by division of rooted sections, and can be grown from seed though the species is polymorphic and somewhat apomictic so seedlings may not come true.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile (facultatively apomictic)
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. A lean-ground pioneer of dry, open, often sandy or poor soils in the wild; needs little feeding — light compost is enough, since excess nitrogen tends to push soft, disease-prone leafy growth rather than better fruit.
How it spreads. Spreads by stolon-like trailing canes that root at the tip wherever they touch soil, forming low, mounded, expanding colonies rather than an upright thicket.
Grow journal
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