I have been picking a bowl of the Triple Crown Blackberries almost every day now & canes still loaded with the red young ones. I do let the berries turn shiny black & then wait a couple days tiIl the black dulls a bit & as one poster suggested, they are sweeter then. The berries are huge! I must say the problem is keeping the canes from coming up all over the garden & cutting/pulling them up where they don't belong. Also, they must also grow from seed that birds must drop as I have 'babies' coming up all over too... guess they wouldn't grow true to the parent though, coming from seed? I yank these up & toss them, I dig the canes that have come up from the parent & give away to others. Am ashamed, as I still do not have this years fruiting canes & next years cane to fruit quite separated yet as to which is what?!

The university was right in this case. Any freezing or blighting would start on the ends of the pruned laterals. If I did summer lateral pruning of triple crowns here (zone 8), the laterals would just form more laterals--you might end up with even more linear feet of plant. What is the maximum crop weight you could sell? You got 400 pounds off 1800 feet of row this year, that is less than 4 ounces per foot, of course the planting is still very young, and there was weather damage. I can easily get 5 pounds per foot in my mature home garden patch. That is AFTER pruning off almost half of all the total lateral length and throwing it away. So 10 pounds per foot should be feasible, that would be 18,000 pounds of berries under good conditions. U-picks around here are charging around $2/pound. If you don't think that many would sell, start with removing all laterals that are going the wrong direction for a u-pick patch (perpendicular to the row)(u-pickers might break/stomp a lot of them anyway)(they are too stiff to maneuver down the wires without breaking at the main cane). Your plants are at 6-foot spacing, so prune the parallel-to-row laterals at several feet, they may overlap from adjacent plants. Much easier to train. Wrong-way laterals can be broken off when very young (with longer laterals you gain back some production lost to the discarded laterals). For triple crowns, the tautness of the top wire is key. 25-foot support spacing may be too long.

Slating T post put post inline with row this allow mowing closer to plants in row that one reason. next when go to cut old canes out they are easier to remove. Next on first year plants are smaller so wire can be lower and closer to ground to support half size plant. The growth of plant will show need to move wire up slanted T post on Triple crown are Chickasaw blackberry plant vegetation fast growing first move wire be just below white paint on top post tie wire on end post up wood post this allow slack as move wire up T post also wrap 3 wraps so give slack to wire. Wire will tighten as moves up slanted T post when I speech of tighten just take slack out wire with bull nose pliers by hand. On backyard planting any system work are small plot like use at university when get 200 ft. and above row length V trellis workable. Watching adult plant needs and mowing spraying and pruning give V trellis best ideal. Cost very cheap design. I had up to 800 ft. blackberry rows with one 6 inch tread post on each end and slanted T-post every 30 ft. one high tensile #12 on each row side plants where Chickasaw grow to 16 ft wide all berries on and over wire it was a blackberry fruit wall. On 5 acres picked 52,000 lbs. first year after plant where in ground for 17 months berries on receipt from Michigan berry growers Association. V-trellis support all weight perfectly wind before thunder storm plant lift up give big wave and settle back down I wave back lol.

Glenn i read the description at Nourse and I'm very excited if they are indeed zone 4 hardy. I'm already deciding where to build a 20-30 foot row with probably a few plants of each. I would be curious to know if they had a spreading habit similar to a raspberry or keep the normal compact growth at the base of blackberries. Micheal I already mowed my strawberries last weekend and plan on mulching them with leaves probably in a few weeks or when we start getting heavy frosts. Could be a while as we had 85-95 degree weather last week. But it rained yesterday and it's very cloudy so i think fall has finally come here. The only fallbearing raspberries i have are two rows of Fall Gold yellow raspberries, which I'm not too impressed with but if the yellow jackets were not so bad i could probably pick a few gallons before it frosts hard. I'm also considering not cutting the Fall Golds down to the ground this fall/winter. I may let them overwinter and just cut off the top parts that are fruiting now this winter. Or maybe just cut down one row all the way, and the other the new way. If i get a decent early crop in June/July maybe the yellow jackets won't be a problem. Also i have a row of raspberries that were labeled Caroline at my local farmer's market which had a small crop of say 2 cups this summer off the small canes that overwintered. I thought it was a summer raspberry when i bought it. I didn't realize Caroline was a fallbearing variety until i did some reading online this past couple months. But so far there have been no blossoms so I am questioning whether it was labeled wrong at the market or if it a late variety not suited for my area. I'll try to get a picture up of the canes to see if anyone can notice similarities or differences between my "Caroline" raspberries and any others who truly have this variety.