Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and more: All berries are perennial fruits with attractive flowers that are good for supporting pollinators and attracting wildlife. Between them, they can keep you in fresh fruit May though late summer, with plenty left over to store for less abundant times. Some types make great barrier fences. They’re also very healthy foods; sometimes called superfoods.
When I first started converting my yard to edibles though, the cane berries (black and raspberries) in particular intimidated me. I read about all the recommended care, floricanes vs. primocanes, pruning methods and such… it sounded complicated, so I put off trying them.
Then at the end of one season when the vines were going cheap I knew I didn’t have much to lose, so I just bought one and stuck it in the ground next to and old fence between us and our neighbors.
Cane berries turned out to be so easy to grow, and also make a discouraging barrier fence.
I’ve been eating from that planting ever since. Along the way I put in a couple of different species of berries further along the fence, both for variety and to extend the picking season. I followed the same high-tech method: Dig hole. Stick in plant. Wish it well.
Here are the things I’ve learned along the way:
Berries don’t really need most of the recommended, complicated care
My techniques weren’t exactly master gardener, but I’ve had nice crops of berries of all three species (raspberries, blackberries, and grapes) every year since first planting. That fence line isn’t pretty, but it’s a great barrier (due more to the vines than the pitiful fencing). I do give it a bit of compost in the spring when I bring in a pickup truck full for the garden, and I toss some wood mulch in there to suppress weeds underneath, but that’s about it.
Many berries will spread themselves with minimal help.
When berry canes get long enough, the arch over and touch the ground. The tip touching the ground sprouts roots, and you have a new cane set started. To spread a barrier in the direction I desire, all I need do is take the arching vines and bend them so they touch the ground where I want a rooting of berries.
Cane berries are dead easy to spread. I let a mature cane touch the ground and root, the cut it and replanted the root to get this one.
If I want no rooting, I can either just mow over the ground-touching tip, or cut the arch about 18 inches from the new rooting, dig up the rooting with the short shoot, and plant it elsewhere. I’ve used this approach with great success to get free plantings to make a barbed wire fence at The Place to an actual, discouraging barrier. Everybody out here knows how to get over a barbed wire fence easily, but a thicket of blackberries is discouraging.
Grapes are harder to spread
I’ve gotten a lot of horizontal vine development from the grape plantings, and followed several sets of suggestions for starting new plants from cuttings. The horizontal vines work great and I get more grapes than I need every year; but the cuttings have failed every time (so far). If any of you have good tips, please share!
Strawberries are also perennials that make great ground cover
Strawberries aren’t any kind of a barrier, but they do make a good living mulch, covering the ground and keeping it cool and moist. I’ve had good success pairing them with the (also perennial) asparagus. I planted both in the same bed last year. The asparagus is growing up through the strawberries, which are suppressing weeds and setting berries themselves at the same time.
The strawberries make a good living mulch, and the tall thin asparagus doesn’t mind growing right up through it.
Blueberries like more acid soil
I don’t grow these myself yet because ‘everybody says’ you have to amend the soil to make it more acidic, and modifying just one small area to grow just a few bushes seems fussier than its worth; at least when we’ve got a great U-Pick place right between home and where I work. They are a lovely food though.
They’re on my list to try soon, as I’ve ‘picked the low-hanging berries’ (sorry, had to do that) by planting the most well-known, easy to grow species already.
Wildlife like berries too
You can choose whether to share with the birds or put up bird netting; but they will find and enjoy any of the species named here if you don’t stop them. I used to put up netting; now the plantings have spread themselves so far I have more than enough so I let the birds take a share.
This is what bird netting is like. If you put it much before the fruit is ripe, the vines grow through it and there’s no removing it without savaging the vines. Otherwise, it’s reusable.
Plenty of options for preservation
I always freeze some of each type (in ziplock bags) because it’s so darned easy to store and use, as well as being really tasty about January. However, if the power goes those are gone, so I spread the wealth. I’m not big into canning, so I dehydrate.
Blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries make great fruit leather. Put a bunch of berries in the blender and beat them up, then pour the mash onto waxed paper on dehydrator trays and run it until it’s pretty dry. If it’s still sticky, it’s liable to mold <– sad experience. Toss in a couple of oxygen absorbers and vacuum seal the jars and they’re good for years.
Strawberries dry nicely sliced. A boiled egg slicer is a quick and easy method for slicing the berries. Black and raspberries have always disappointed me after being dried whole. They dry fine but aren’t very flavorful afterwards.
Blueberries are very tasty dried to about the texture of a raisin, but I found I have to split the skins first. They take forever to dry if the skins are intact. I tried a blanching method I found on the net, but that was only partially successful. Squishing the berries (either by hand when setting them on the drying trays, or wholesale by putting a bunch in a flat tray and squishing a smaller flat tray onto the top of them) worked well for me.
One care tip ended up being important
When breaking all the other ‘rules’ about cane berries worked for me, I decided to try ignoring the rule not to plant black raspberries anywhere near wild blackberries. My transplants did great for two weeks then simultaneously and quickly died. That sounds a lot like they fell victim to a viral disease, only mildly annoying to wild blackberries but fatal to black raspberries. They tell me aphids (the plant equivalent of mosquitoes; insects that live by sucking plant juices) transmit this disease from the blackberries to the black raspberries.
The black raspberry disease story and some other disease concerns for perennials planted near wild species are told here (clicky).
Not all berries get along. These raspberry transplants were dead a week after this photo, victims of a wild blackberry disease