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Neglected Blackberries!

As you may recall, we are renting our garden space in a Community Garden. In doing so, we inherited a short row of thorny blackberries (maybe 12 ft. long). All we know is that they are thorny blackberries. We do not know what variety and will only find out what the berries are like by eating some of the berries this summer. This variety will produce some berries on the floricanes this summer, meaning that the canes that grew last summer will flower and produce berries this summer. All the current canes are short and very small in diameter. This indicates that they were not watered, not fertilized, or both during their last growing year. We intend to change that by making sure that they have plenty of water and fertilizer and are kept relatively weed free this summer. We have been doing this for the past month and are already seeing results. The new primocanes are growing rapidly thick, tall and lush. As these new primocanes grow, we will train them up on the trellis and prepare them for flowering and producing berries a year from now in the summer. Later in the year we will trim away the floricanes, after they have finished producing this summers’s small crop of berries.