Photo: User:SB_Johnny — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 4 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Ordinary wild blackberry — sweet-tart, variable between clones.
- Hardiness
- Zone 4–8
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Aug–Sept
- Mature size
- Erect to arching thorny cane 1–3 m
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Eastern and central North America, from southern Canada through the central and eastern United States.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Vigorous — arching canes can reach up to about 3 m (10 ft) in a single season, typical of wild eastern blackberries.
- Spacing
- 90 cm (35 in) apart — about 1.2 per m² (1.1 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Compound leaf, typically with 5 leaflets on first-year canes and 3 leaflets on second-year flowering canes; leaflets ovate with serrate margins, borne on prickly petioles.
- Root system
- Woody, branching perennial root system that produces vigorous root suckers, combined with cane tips that root on contact with soil, letting the plant spread quickly into loose colonies.
- Fruit description
- Black, globoid-to-ovoid aggregate fruit up to about 2 cm (3/4 in) long, made up of 10-100 drupelets, with a sweet-tart flavor typical of wild blackberries — quality is variable between individual wild clones since the species reproduces facultatively by apomixis as well as sexually.
- Propagation
- By seed sown in a well-drained, organically rich seedbed; by division of suckers in early spring; or by stem cuttings — canes also root readily wherever their tips touch the ground.
- 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. Tolerates a wide range of soils — loam, clay-loam, or rocky ground — and needs little supplemental feeding. As with cultivated blackberries generally, excess nitrogen pushes cane and leaf growth at the expense of flowering laterals, so light, infrequent feeding is preferable to heavy fertilizing.
How it spreads. Spreads by root suckers from a woody, branching root system and by cane tips rooting where they touch the ground, forming the loose colonies and thickets typical of wild eastern blackberries.
Growing tips. A typical thorny, biennial-caned bramble — first-year primocanes are vegetative, second-year floricanes flower, fruit, and then die back. Susceptible to Fusarium wilt of blackberry as well as the honey fungus and cane borers common across the genus. Fruits best in full sun.
Grow journal
Sign in to keep a dated log of when you planted, bloomed and harvested this plant.