Too many brambles?

I would love to grow as many different berries at home as possible. We live in Michigan’s upper peninsula, and half of those berries are all related as far as I know. I’m talking about thimbleberries, raspberries and blackberries. Not to mention they are all also in the rose/apple family.

We have 4 big sugar maples along the north side of our driveway and my plan is to sheet mulch a sort of keyhole garden bed around each of them and plant berries in the beds. I’m just laying about an inch of sawdust and then about 8” of woodchips. Ill plant directly in unamended soil unless thats a bad idea. We have a decent amount of clay but I’m not overly concerned about that.

My concern is, if we have blackberries, raspberries and thimbleberries all planted within 50 yards or so of eachother, will they hybridize or get diseases from too much sibling rivalry? I’m planning on digging wild thimbleberries this week to transplant. I have Golden ever bearing raspberries to transplant and still need to find blackberries. Also, I plan to mow around the beds to keep them from taking over the yard. I should have taken a picture but that will have to wait for now.

I think it would be cool to grow all of those!

Most of them shouldn't normally interbreed, but if they do, maybe you will have a cool adapted interspecies berry hybrid. Even if they don't hybridize, if you have a few different varieties of a species, you could get a neat landrace one day!

As long as your plants are well adapted to your area they should do fine. I would just let the weaker and more disease susceptible ones die off and the tougher ones live on and reproduce and make more tough and even better adapted plants for your area.

If interbreeding is an issue it's because you are letting them seed, and then you'll have a huge unmanageable thorny thicket anyway so crosses will be the least of your worries!

Out of the entire rose family I think that Rubus is the most hardy and native of the bunch. So plant away. Even better if you can get alot of thornless cultivars. I think that they will be minimal hybridization so don't worry about it too much.

I support you in plant more Rubus brambles.

I have bramble, red and black raspberries, thimbleberry and Japanese wineberry all in a garden 10m by 20m. Hybrids between some of these are possible, but rare and potentially interesting, so not a worry. Diseases haven't been an issue.

Skandi Rogers wrote:If interbreeding is an issue it's because you are letting them seed, and then you'll have a huge unmanageable thorny thicket anyway so crosses will be the least of your worries!

Letting them seed is somewhat inevitable right? I mean, even if I pick the berries diligently, I’m bound to miss some.