Optimal Care for Blackberry cuttings?

Hi to all,

In Zone 7a/7b I have 33 blackberry cuttings coming. Nightime temps are in the upper 20s/low 30s day is pretty much holding in the 40s around here. My other assorted cuttings (plum, pear, apple, cherry, peach, mulberry) are heeled in and treated with root growth hormone in the shade behind a shed. Should I treat my brambles in the same way? Do they require watering at all? Is rooting hormone wasted on bramble cuttings?  Hoping for great success with a major food forest project next spring. Thanks for any help. Mike L

Hi Michael--

I'd say dip them in rooting hormone just to be safe and then heel them in and mulch deeply at this time of year. In my experience brambles usually root pretty easily, but no guarantees.

Good luck and hope you get lots of berries!

Catherine

wow, here where I live they are considered a noxious weed!
The county has an ordinance against letting it grow out of your yard- conditions here make it as "expandable" as bamboo.
great tasting berries on most - so I understand why people want them. crazy lot of varieties.
this time of year they seem to have just finished their fall stretch - so will be almost dormant until temps come back up in the spring - don't give up on them if they seem like nothing for a while - once they get going and establish a kernel -

they seem to want a lot of water - wet often and good drainage is what I think I see. or if at the edge of a source of water they will adjust to make the most of it.
at least where I see them growing here.
they do survive the winters here - although the couple of negative 17's we have had  seemed to calm them down for a while.

after they have been established for a couple years - there will be a lot of old dead blackberry stuff under them - and it is crazy fire material.
keep/plant it far away from things you want to not have burned up - it absolutely will catch a spark - so - as awesome as blackberry syrup/jelly/jam/pie can be (and usually is!) - I would be careful with where I plant it.
I have seen a growing area of them catch from a nearby burn pile ember drifting over and in - even the green growing branches seemed to turn in to jet fuel once it got hot. I am glad I was there to help them put it out - it got up against a storage building and charred the side of it.
seems like they grow/bloom/set berries in the spring into late summer - and while the berries are there - I see a lot of stringers growing - almost like it is to help protect the berries as well as expand territory.
Raccoons/ possums/ bears/deer/goats - even Horses will get after them. Raccoons and possums replant them as they continue their trek and leave their waste. goats will trim them back. the others seem to just want the berries.
my chickens won't touch them. that might be a way to keep it clear from some of the fire hazard underneath them as they get bigger.
hope you get your starts going and enjoy!

You made some really solid points Rob, thank you. Like Michael I live in zone 7b. The blackberries that grow wild here are the best tasting ones I’ve ever eaten. They are however, a literal pain. They like to grow up through my elderberries and chokecherry’s causing me lots scrapes and scratches. I have found them to be a great erosion stopper in one of my fields though.
It’s steep Carolina clay and soil loss is a real issue. I’m thankful that wildfires are not a huge threat here though. If they were my outlook would probably be very different.

I'll just add that they are going to want to be damp but not in standing water while they are establishing. We have various brambles and they root themselves all over but I notice they are less thick and robust in the wettest areas of my wetland areas and they die back in areas where the water doesn't drain well.

There can be considerable variation in the hardiness of different varieties.  Those that have planted thornless in this area have found they are just as hardy as the so called Himalaya.  How the cutting was rooted is probably more important. They naturally root when a vine contacts the ground and will try to get a tip of the vine to root over the winter.  Such root tip plants would require frost heaving out of the ground and drying out to not survive. So that is how I propagate them.  If the cutting is not rooted or only small roots and not a crown they will take extensive care until they form a crown.  A crown is a circle of strong roots with at least the last years vine and a new shoot bud for the coming year.  If I go out in my berry rows now I could find some of these new crowns where I did not get the vines up high enough to prevent the tip rooting.

Hi Michael!

Looks like an exciting project!  And you got a lot of good information already, but I want to say shade might not be the place for your berry cuttings.  I would say keep in mind a fairly constant temperature (the mulch should do that for them... Cellular division is what is going to get roots on those cuttings, and a good even temperature that is above freezing will support the process...  

Where I live now, the ground freezes in the winter.  Where I grew up, the ground did not freeze at all, just sometimes surface frost.  In both cases, if I were to be embarking on the undertaking, I would make a minor berm on an east west axis, providing for good loose soil (with plenty of soil food web members),  heel the cuttings in on the sunward side of that berm, and maintain soil moisture if precipitation does not.  I wouldn't use rooting hormone, but that''s a personal choice, nothing wrong with it.

If I thought there was going to be a stretch of VERY cold nights, I might use a light mulch of straw or what have you, the idea being to allow light through, but protect from heat loss...

Brambles are so willing to grow, I am sure you will succeed.
Be happy, Have fun with it!

Forgot to say, coarse medium encourages root growth... very fine soil not so much.

One more thought:  most don’t bear on new shoots, you may not get a crop until 2023.  There are primo-cane varieties(I think that is the term), but I think you would know if you had ordered that.

Willow shoots have so much rooting hormone, you can put willows and brambles in the same bucket, and they will “all” root.  A handy trick to know for some of the more reluctant cuttings.

Michael - are your blackberries a cultivated variety? There is a HUGE variability in fruit quality - size, sweetness, toughness, ratio of pith to fruit, depth of flavour. In my area we have a couple of huge patches that are great, producing big juicy fruit. 50m away the blackberries are anaemic and flavourless.

I would definitely want to use a cultivate variety if going for a project like this.