Week 19 shows continued growth with 164 canes at the 36" wire and 24 at the 54" wire. They may be slowing down a bit as it has been in the low to mid-90's all of last week. Some of the literature I read about Primark-Freedom indicated that it suffered in the heat so I will keep close tabs on it.
I sprinkled a little calcium nitrate along the edges at a rate of about 2/3 ounce per plant as the summer thunderstorm season seems to be settling in. We have had 2.71" in the first 9 days of the month so soil moisture is almost homogenous down to 32". Our soils are so sandy that all the N2 washes away pretty quickly so I thought they could use a pick-me-up with all the vegetative growth and some berry production.
Speaking of berries, I'm starting to get a few every day now. This morning I picked 10 from these vines plus a handful from my older, mistreated vines and a few wild berries for good measure. It seemed like a good time to do some comparisons so out came my little kitchen scale, an old pie plate and a camera. The top photo shows 10 berries of each variety. The wild berries averaged 1.4 grams each, the Natchez or Ouichita (I don't remember which) averaged 2.4 grams each. The Freedon's averaged 9.9 grams each! Granted the Natchez and Ouchita were terribly mistreated, tortured with salty mushroom compost and cedar mulch and should be bigger, but man, look at the difference!
It is my pleasure to announce the arrival of our first ripe blackberry! A little over an inch tall and wide, our new arrival weighs in at 9 grams.
My wife and I shared the berry and it was a bit tart; needed another day on the vine. But man was it juicy! First time I have bitten in to a blackberry and had juice run down my chin!
Week 18 has lots of growth, both vertically and horizontally. We are up to 131 canes tied to the middle (36") wire, up almost 50 canes since last week. A few are berry clusters but most continue to be new canes. It takes me about 30 minutes every morning to tie and tip this new growth, all of which continues to grow out of the first few inches above the ground. The plants are really starting to form a hedgerow that can be a little hard to discriminate from the muscadines in the background - exactly what I wanted as a visual wall between me and the road!
Two plants are now tied to the top (54") wire. Both of these plants formed a tee at the 36" tipping point so each has provided 2 new canes that I plan on just letting grow. The overall plan is to tip growth from the first 18" off the ground at 36", growth from 18-36" gets tipped at 54" and growth from 36" or above gets left alone. Does this sound reasonable?
I did edge the bed this week; I try to do it every 3 weeks or so. I have a little tractor with a two-disk harrow on the back that I remove one blade and set the other to throw the dirt from the cut-line back onto the bed. My hope is to keep Bermuda grass from taking over while encouraging the blackberry roots to stay in the bed. Love to hear some feedback on this technique.
Week 17 and I'm seeing a lot of growth coming from the crown or just above. Most of the new canes are just that; canes as opposed to the fruiting stems. The canes are bigger, softer and more red. Below are a couple of pictures of berry clusters. In the background of the first picture, you can see the red cane.
In the second you see a different berry cluster where the stem is visible. The stem has little red colorization.
The weather has been weird this week with upper 80's afternoons and about a 1/10" of rain each day, not enough not to irrigate but enough to stop sprinkling the top. I have been watering for about two hours every four days. Most of the canes are stalled just above the 36" wire where I tipped them though a few are showing new growth around the top in lateral formation. I think the guy in the picture below escaped the guuillotine, so I'm just gonna let it go and see what happens. He's almost at the 54" wire.
I have done a lot of taping this week, almost two rolls for the month! Each morning I'll go out with my trusty 1/2" landscape tape and a fix new growth to an available wire. I have started using a new metric for measuring bushyness - # of canes attached to the middle wire. For this week the number starts out at 84, or about 2.3 canes per plant.
This picture shows #11 and #12; #11 being the first to get to 36" and #12 being inadvertently tipped at 18". I couldn't really say that 18" tipping makes the plant easy more bushy than one tipped at 36". I'll keep monitoring it.
Till next week
I wanted to share my experience growing thornless primocane blackberries in North Florida with the hope of some good discussion on methods and results. I am no expert, on anything at all, so please take any conclusions I might arrive at as possible but certainly not fact.
I had planted a small bed of Blackberries four years ago, three Natchez and three Navaho. Though not intentionally, I tortured those poor plants with bad soil amendments, poor watering strategies, ineffective weed control and periodic bouts of inattention. Despite all of this, the still rewarded me with some very tasty berries.
But I learned a lot, lessons that I will share later.
So last year I decided to start fresh. I tilled up a 100' x 4' planting bed incorporating about a yard of homemade compost, lime and 10-10-10 fertilizer at the rate recommended by soil analysis. I actually planted tomatoes there last year - I know, not supposed to do that, but I figured to get some return while the lime was doin it's thing.
I put up a three wire trellis with the wires spaced 18" from the ground up. On the bottom wire I zip-tied 5/8" drip distribution tubing with 1 gph emitters spaced every three feet to fall between the plants. Everything was now ready for planting.
On February 4th my plants arrived from Nourse Farms. I had never planted a plug plant before so I had no idea what they actually were. They looked like a 2" deep style nursery seedling pot but instead of the pot it was a plastic sleeve that slipped over the roots. It came shipped in a heavy waxed cardboard box in fine condition. Sorry I didn't take pictures, but I was in a rush to get them in the ground. I used a little-bitty trowel and made a hole, slipped them in about 1/2" deep and covered them up. After planting all 36, I came back and watered them in well.
These are pictures week 1 in the ground. I'll use these two reference views throughout the post for comparison sake. They didn't die the first week so I was happy! Weather was still seasonally cool: I used that great wax box to start a couple of fires in my wood-stove. Weather was cool and dry. I have a weather station and soil moisture system installed for the muscadines planted right behind the blackberries, and knew everything was good at the 9" and 32" deep levels. I soon figured out though in later weeks that our Florida soil tends to dry very quickly so I started giving them a sprinkle every day or so to keep the surface moist.
Week 2 and 3 look about the same. I did have to water though and if you look carefully you can see little divots in the soil under each drip emitter. This is when I realized that even though I added all that compost, it was still basically sand. The emitters could get water to the plant at the 2" deep level, but the surface was still dry at the plant. I wondered if my irrigation plan was going to work? I had read somewhere or another that new plants should not have the soil dry over an inch or two, so I started surface sprinkling.
These were taken March 4th, a month to the day after planting. March was warm and wet and the plants responded well. I started weeding at this point using a shuffle hoe. If you are not familiar, it is essentially a sharpened metal loop on the end of a stick that is perfect for sliding under weeds about 1/2" below the surface. I keep mine pretty sharp so it makes quick work so long as you don't get behind!
March 16th sees the beginning of a serious growth spurt! They look about the size of a strawberry plant now and they are all pretty uniform. I had to sprinkle a couple of days but we had 8 3/4" over the course of the month so no irrigation was required.
April 7th has me tying the canes as they reach the first wire, 18" from the ground. The tips were green and as you moved down toward the crown, the stalks would fade to red; about like rhubarb. After inadvertently breaking off the tips on one plant and damaging another so that it was effectively tipped, I figured out to wait until I could tie on to the reddish part of the cane. On the other hand I now had three plants tipped at 18", those two above and another courtesy of a mockingbird. My plan was to tip them all at the 36" wire, so now I can compare if 18" or 36" tipping is better.
'
April 13th has all of the plants reaching the second wire. I started to notice a trend about now that some plants focused all there energy on one cane, some on two and a couple on three, with fewer canes growing tall faster.
April 21st and a few of the canes start reaching toward the second wire. At this point we haven't had rain in all couple of weeks and I am activating the irrigation system every three days for 2 hours. That is 70 gallons in about 200 square feet of row top. I wondered at this point if the roots were long enough to pull water from a little deeper so I didn't sprinkle for a couple of days. Leaves started showing signs of stress so I went back to sprinkling. Perhaps I should have used more emitters, or maybe spray nozzles?
April 26th and look at the growth!
Found this little stowaway growing out of plant #2. I had never seen it, so I snapped her picture and sent it back to Nourse Farms who identified it as pigweed. I liberated it from its blackberry host and # 2 plant is now starting to put on speed. I kinda felt dumb for not knowing what pigweed looked like but I'm sort of used to that.
May 11th finds all of the plants reaching the 36" wire with the exception of those tipped at 18" point. As they passed the 36" wire, I taped them to the wire and cut off the top 2 or 3" using my thumbnail. They certainly do bush up, but I think, for at least now, the plant reroutes energy to the other canes because everything so far is still coming out of the crown. I'm looking forward to seeing new laterals come out of the tipped cane.
These are before and after pictures of the tip of a cane and then a picture of what's left next to a full size Bic lighter. I would imagine if you let them get a few inches longer you could root the tips, but I would imagine this variety is patented for a while to come, maybe 2028?
May 17th looking good. There are actually quite a few berries on these plants, all at the tops of some of the newer canes. I'm not sure of the onset of bloom was brought about by the calendar, the weather, or the tipping?
Here is a picture of #11, 12, and 13. #12 was an accidental tip at 18" whereas the other two were tipped at 36". #12 is definitely bushier but time will tell if this is a good thing or not. Jasper, my neighbors dog makes a gues appearance.
I'll try and keep this updated unless lots of people say don't bother. If you have any comments please do post them. If you have these plants, let me know what you are experiencing. - Earl
