A bowlful of soft, luscious berries is delicious - but the plants themselves are nothing to write home about. The Blackberry is our least favourite plant in the garden and although Doc tidied up the bed last autumn, I finished the process yesterday, in the bitterly cold weather. It is not my favourite job.
Doc had already dug out one plant so we only have one left now but we have no doubts that it will try to take over the whole garden by the end of this season. This one bush could be more than enough for us to cope with. It is a cultivated variety yet it has viscous thorns. The runners are deadly and try to come up through the membrane and bark which covers the bare ground between the raised beds in Mr Macgregor’s Garden. If we did not enjoy the black jewels so much, we would kill the lot! But you can't beat apple and blackberry pie for with custard. Blackberries are the THE fruit of late summer and autumn. The smell of a single blackberry brings back many childhood memories of walking country lanes with a bucket overflowing with fruit and licking my sticky, purple fingers.
Technically, you need to selectively prune blackberries because they are biennial. This means they grow the stems one year and fruit on them the next. If you simply hack them back with a machete, you will remove the new wood and consequently lose all promise of fruit that season. However, finding a route to the base of the plant to cut out the old wood is easier set than done. It is like wrestling with a monster which always has the last laugh. It is sometimes difficult to identify the old and new wood so we just do what is possible and every few years, we have to carry out a full on assault - and sacrifice a year's fruit.
We grow autumn fruiting raspberries and they are much easier to maintain than the summer fruiting varieties, which behave like blackberries and need more selective pruning. In February, all you need to do to autumn raspberries is cut the canes to the ground, tidy up any weeds and mulch the soil with compost. However, we have given one corner of their bed a more thorough going over this winter. Lots of grass had infiltrated the canes so we needed to remove it all because it competes for moisture and stunts the growth of the canes. We have also thinned the canes and removed some of the older ones. Our canes fruit from July to November and we don’t miss summer raspberries because there are usually some lovely strawberries to keep us happy during May and June.
We also have a Japanese Wineberry plant and the fruits are similar in shape to raspberries but are tiny, dark red and taste of – wine! It is a much prettier plant, with white flowers and pink stems (with thorns!) which we train over the trellis and up a pergola. Yesterday, I pruned it carefully, removed the old wood and tied in the new shoots. Left to its own devices it would produce a huge, fountain of a bush with 6-7 foot arching stems. It sits next to the blackberry bush and is definitely the better looking of the two. The fruits are very juicy too and we love them on cereal in the mornings.
We have a couple of loganberry and tayberry plants but they are not very abundant and we don’t find them as tasty as blackberries, raspberries and the wineberries. However, they do add interest to Mr Macgregor’s garden and we like having them around.
Thankfully, we will have forgotten the pain of dealing with the blackberry bush by the time it fruits this year and by then we will be pleased we persevered with the task. We just have to remember to wear sleeves when we pick the fruits......
It’s only a few weeks before I start sowing tomato, sweet pepper and chilli seeds and not long after that when the planting season really gathers momentum. In preparation for ‘S’ day, I went to the Garden Centre today to stock up on compost and this task is not something I look forward to because sourcing the right potting compost can be a trial by consumerism.
There are so many different brands and endless types of compost to choose from. I can’t compare like with like because each brand uses a different recipe and I am told that the recipes change from year to year. In addition, I have to consider peat-free, organic and loam based composts and whether or not I need compost for seeds, young plants or established shrubs. By the time I have analysed the prices, including the three-for-two deals, my head hurts.
In an ideal world Doc and I would like to be totally peat-free in the garden. However, one year we had a near disaster when the tomato plantlets sat in their pots of eco-friendly compost doing nothing in particular. After much temperature checking and bug searching, I concluded the culprit was the compost so rushed out to buy new, established tomato plants and peat-based compost - before it was too late. It was very irritating.
However, for the last couple of seasons I have had good results if I use a peat-based compost specifically made for sowing seeds and then when the plants are growing on, I transfer the plants into a peat-free compost such as Vital Earth.
After several minutes looking around (in the inevitable cold) I chose a seed compost, mainly because it was a smaller sized bag. Unfortunately, there was no Vital Earth compost. Still, technology was there to rescue me so I sat down for a coffee and consulted the oracle, a.k.a the internet. Apparently, New Horizon’s organic peat-free multi-purpose compost received an award from ‘Which’ magazine and it was in stock at the Garden Centre. I did consider ordering it from the internet for convenience sake but it was cheaper to break my back (!) so I hauled three bags for the price of two into my trolley.
I needed some John Innes 1 and 2 (watch your back because these are very heavy) for re-potting some shrubs and some ericaceous compost for a young potted Christmas tree. I topped off the trolley with seaweed feed and organic slug pellets and headed for the checkout.
The assistant behind the counter asked me if I really wanted the New Horizon compost because it was the ‘digging in’ variety. Apparently, I needed the purple coloured bags; the ones I had struggled with were compost for mulching beds and borders. She was very kind and summoned a gentleman to help me replace them. Bless him, he did try his best but he could not quite manage to lift the bags so he steadied the trolley and I wrestled with my bags of compost.
A brief snow flurry began just as I was crossing the car park and I nearly ran over a lady in a wheelchair which was embarrassing. She was very generous and said I needed a man. Quite. But defiantly liberated, I persevered and hauled the bags into the car, drove home and then made two trips with the wheelbarrow to transport my booty all the way down the garden, to the shed. It was a relief to get back to the warmth of the kitchen and felt I had earned my cup of tea and piece of cake.
There won’t be enough compost. There never is. I will go back for more because I always do but at least I have a stock of compost to get the new season started. I will let you know how I get on with my New Horizon compost. Though I have a feeling I will meet someone who swears by another brand and I will feel guilty that my tomato plants will be deprived of goodness they deserve.
