Photo: Ivar Leidus — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Survives zone 5 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
The familiar blackberry — sweet-tart, excellent fresh and cooked; quality varies enormously between microspecies. An aggregate of hundreds of apomictic microspecies, not a single species.
- Hardiness
- Zone 5–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Aug–Sept
- Mature size
- Vigorous arching cane 2–4 m; tip-roots — needs containment
- Light
- Full sun to partial — best fruit in sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Native to Europe — including Britain — south to the Mediterranean and Macaronesia; long naturalized and often invasive well beyond this range, including the Pacific Northwest of North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Fast — reaches roughly 3 m x 3 m within a couple of seasons, and individual canes can extend several meters in a single growing season.
- Spacing
- 120 cm (47 in) apart — about 1.4 m² (16 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Palmately compound leaves with 3–5 coarsely toothed leaflets. Canes are heavily armed with numerous curved or straight prickles, and prickles often occur on the leaf undersides and midribs as well.
- Root system
- A perennial crown and shallow spreading root system in the top 30–40 cm, carrying biennial canes: each cane grows one year, fruits the next, then dies. New shoots come from buds on both the crown and the roots, which is why a bramble returns from root fragments left after digging and why it is so hard to remove once settled.
- Fruit description
- A true blackberry — the drupelets stay attached to the white receptacle (torus), which comes away with the fruit when picked, leaving a solid center rather than a hollow one (the reverse of a raspberry). Ripens through green and red stages to glossy black; sweet with some tartness when fully ripe, though — being an aggregate of several hundred slightly different apomictic microspecies — flavor and size vary considerably from patch to patch.
- Propagation
- Overwhelmingly propagated vegetatively — tip layering is the plant's own preferred method (arching canes root wherever the tip touches soil in July, and the new plant is severed and moved in autumn) — plus half-ripe cuttings and division of rooted crowns. Because most microspecies in the aggregate reproduce apomictically, seed-grown offspring are genetically identical to the parent rather than variable, but cuttings and layers remain the standard nursery method.
- Pollination
- SELF-FERTILE (largely 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. Established erect blackberry types are typically fed around 1.5 oz nitrogen per plant (roughly 80 lb N/acre) per year, applied in early spring to support primocane growth; semi-erect and trailing types are fed somewhat less per plant depending on soil and vigor. Tolerates nutritionally poor soils better than most fruiting brambles.
How it spreads. One of the most aggressively spreading brambles — canes that arch or trail up to 7 m root wherever the tip reaches soil, while the roots also sucker underground, so a single plant can build a dense, thorny, effectively impenetrable thicket within a few seasons. This combination of tip-rooting and suckering is why the aggregate is classed as a noxious weed in parts of North America and Australasia.
Growing tips. Fruits on floricanes (second-year canes) in most forms. Canes are stout, green to purplish-red, round or angled, and armed with numerous curved or straight prickles, sometimes with stalked glands as well. Full sun gives the best fruit set, though the plant tolerates considerable shade at the cost of cropping. Susceptible to cane blight, spur blight, anthracnose, verticillium wilt, and aphid-vectored viruses, and — being a blackberry — vulnerable to the systemic, incurable orange rust (Gymnoconia nitens) that red raspberry resists. Prune out spent floricanes after harvest and thin/tip new primocanes to keep growth manageable; because it is genuinely difficult to contain, site it where root barriers or regular mowing can control its spread.
Companion planting. Blackberries are generally listed juglone-sensitive — keep away from black walnut's root zone. (Black raspberry, R. occidentalis, is the exception among brambles and tolerates it fine.)
Grow journal
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