When we bought StarField Farm, it took us several years to discover what our land contained. In fact it took us until just 3 years ago to realize we had thorn-less blackberries! That was the year the weather didn’t cooperate and we couldn’t effectively mow the area around what we call the kitchen garden and discovered that we had been mowing down these blackberry canes.
Lucky for us, they are hard to kill!
Now, Neil has a vandetta against berry canes. And I know – they do take over – but big, juicy blackberries! Totally worth a bit of a tangle in the yard.
So I promised to keep the canes in check and have them twined around this trellis.
I probably should have pruned them earlier, but between the cold weather and a back injury, today is when I was able to get to them.
I try to keep the main canes under 4′ tall and the side branches about 2′ or less.
Since we won’t have any peaches this year :sob:, I’m hoping it will be a bountiful berry year.
I also got to the aronia (chokeberry) tree that I had done a bit of a hack job pruning last year. It had become wildly overgrown and was rubbing against the siding of the house. Because of how aggressive I was last year, we got little to no berries then, but it’s also a very forgiving plant and with a better pruning job now, we should have a nice crop come late summer/early fall.