Blackberries dying before ripening. zone 8
maximusdecimus
11 years ago
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larry_gene
11 years agomaximusdecimus
11 years agoRelated Discussions
Blackberries in Zone 5 or Colder
Comments (9)Hopefully inspiration for blackberry growers (especially of Chester Thornless) in zone 5 or colder: I'm in zone 3 (Alberta) and I've been growing Chester Thornless for the past 4 years. I put in 2 plants in a south-facing location in spring 2009 so no production that year, just getting floricanes. Canes laid down along the ground and mulched heavily with leaves for winter. In spring 2010, only one of the 2 plants came back and by the time a killing freeze came in mid-September I had only picked one ripe berry, with about 30 unripe berries left on the vine to freeze. Got another Chester to plant in a west-facing location, which did not produce as it was just establishing floricanes. Another leaf-covering added in early November, on canes that spread up to 8 feet long. In spring 2011, the long trailing canes died back to a central core area that survived on both plants. The first berry was picked at the end of August, but a warm fall with the killing frost not until mid-October made for a harvest of 449 blackberries from the two plants, and totally hooked me on blackberries. The blackberries we can buy in the store here are grown in Mexico and picked before full ripeness and shipped north, often sour, half the time rather bland. The stuff I can grow -- when I can grow it -- is so much more wonderful! Sweet, and oh so full of flavour! Mulched these plants heavily in the fall with every leaf I could find. Plants now getting big, with a 15 foot spread from end-to-end on just one plant. Spring 2012 -- despite mulching last fall, only one plant survived above ground. The other plant died to ground-level, but came back strongly with new floricanes that might yield a crop in 2013 if I can keep them alive. As for the plant that lived -- a warm summer combined with a killing frost that held off until early October, resulted in a harvest of 524 blackberries from just the one plant! I remain hooked. In Fall 2012 I skipped the mulching with leaves that tended to compact quite a bit over winter, and went with a thick layer of fluffed-up straw, covered with burlap. Winter came early and hard, permanent snow cover was around October 20, earlier than I've ever seen it. I got the blackberries put to bed in the first days of November, just before some big snowfalls. Now everything is buried under a foot of snow, so I await April to see what's up, or what isn't....See MoreCan I help melons ripen before frost?
Comments (10)A lot depends on what our weather does. Most years my watermelons last a bit more deeply into fall than muskmelons, true cantaloupes and other miscellaneous melons do. Once the temperatures drop substantially and the daylength is a littler shorter every day, the melons slow down in growth and can take a longer time to mature. However, they will eventually mature. I am about to take out my muskmelon plants and watermelon plants in the front garden so I can clean up that bed, but I'm going to let the watermelon plants out back go on for as long as they can. Last year we harvested a couple dozen watermelons in October and November, and the flavor was fine but the melons were, for the most part, smaller than fruit on the same vines had been back in the summer months. I just leave the plants alone and let them do their thing. I don't cover them up on cold nights, I don't pinch off blossoms and I don't tip-prune. Our average last frost date is in mid-November, but sometimes the first frost hits in latest September and sometimes not until mid-December, so I'd rather let the plants go on producing for as long as Mother Nature will allow. I missed a couple of melons last year when I harvested the last of them on the day before the first freeze was expected to occur that night, and I didn't find them until 3 or 4 weeks after the first freeze. By the time I found the melons buried under a lot of dead, brown foliage, they'd been exposed to overnight lows as low as 18 degrees and I was surprised they weren't rotting. One wasn't any good. It was smaller and likely was a long way from maturing when the freeze hit. The other one was large and probably was completely mature when we froze, and its very thick rind protected the flesh inside (which surprised me). It was very tasty, but not quite as tasty as summer melons from the same plant that matured in much hotter weather. So, even if your melon has time to reach its mature size and to ripen fully on the vine, the flavor might not be as good as you remember because it matured under cooler conditions. You could try to keep the melons warmer by putting a low tunnel (PVC or EMT hoops covered with clear plastic) over them, but be aware that if you do that, you have to watch them closely because the greenhouse effect can roast the plants to death, and a lack of air flow can encourage fungal diseases. If I was going to to that, I'd probably pull the plastic back off the hoops during the day and pull it back over the hoops in late afternoon to hold in the heat during the night. And, I'd make the hoops go a foot or two above the top of the trellis. If your clear plastic is too close to the plants even in cool autumn weather, they plants can get too hot and be damaged or even killed. My garden does pay for itself most years. I generally can about 600 pints of food and fill up 2 or 3 deep freezes, and then have onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and winter squash in dry storage for the winter months. However, it also costs more money to process and store more food, so the longer the garden is producing heavily, the more money it costs us in terms of processing and storing the excess part of the harvest that we cannot eat fresh. It has taken me many years, though, to arrive at the point where I feel like the garden does pay for itself......and, even if it didn't, I'd have a big garden anyway. I don't garden just as a way to save money in the food budget. I do it because I enjoy it (and I have about 100 other reasons) and I like knowing how our food was grown (as naturally as possible) and I enjoy sharing the produce with our friends and family. Even though I put up a lot of the harvest to eat later on, my favorite thing to do is to eat fresh from the garden in season. You know, when asparagus is in season, I'd never go to the store and buy vast quantities of it so we could eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end, but when it is coming from our own garden, we do eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end. It is the same thing with everything else---something like melons could be on the menu once or twice a week if we didn't have a garden. With a garden? They can be on the menu daily at the height of the season, and often I have enough to share. I often feed the chickens a melon of their own in very hot weather, and sometimes slice one up for the deer as well. A large and highly productive garden lets you do things with food that you wouldn't do if you were paying grocery store prices for that food. Tim wouldn't be happy with me if I went to the grocery store and bought a melon for the chickens!...See MoreNavahoBlackberry and Red Nova Raspberry in zone 10?
Comments (6)I made a mistake in listing the varieties I bought. I just looked at the tags and they are Arapaho, Apache, Natchez, and Ouachita. So, I have 5 varieties total (including the Navaho), 1 Red Nova Raspberry, and 1 Blueberry (either Tift Blue or Power (or Powder?)Blue). I bought the blueberry in early fall before it went dormant so it got all its chill hours from here and it is budding out along with the low chill apples (Golden Dorsett and Anna), so I'm thinking that it may flower. I know that plants that don't get enough chill hours are usually late to break dormancy, which is the case with a Peach tree that I bought 4-5 years ago from Walmart. Back then I had no knowledge of chill hours, and every year it is late to break dormancy. This year we bought Florida Prince Peaches. Since the Anna's Apple is breaking dormancy on time, I'm assuming we got between 2-300 chill hours this past winter, so I'm hoping some of the lower chill blackberries will flower in the years to come. We also had about an entire week of chill hours (day and night) which brought hard freezes to us, which hardly ever happen, so I'm sure that added greatly to the Chill Hour count (even with those anti chill hours of temps above 60*, if they are true) by about 168 chill hours in addition to the ones from December and January....See Moremy results growing prime ark blackberries in zone 4.
Comments (4)thanks! i will report this fall and next to let you all know how they did. i found a thorned variety that grows in zone 3b called nelson. its sold by fedco here in maine. if the prime arks don't work out ill go with them. id like to have them thornless but ill put up with it for a reliable blackberry patch! have a good season!...See Moregator_rider2
11 years agomurkwell
11 years agojabest
9 years agojtburton
9 years ago
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