THE COMPLETE GUIDE GROWING BLACKBERRIES IN CONTAINERS

you will see how easy it is to grow delicious, nutritious blackberries in containers in your garden so this is the blackberry variety we will be growing these are bare rooted trees that you can get at your garden stores and it says assorted blackberry which means I really don't know which variety it is now while you are preparing your containers your soil you need to make sure that the roots of the plant do not dry out so what I'm doing here is I'm trying to make sure that the roots are well hydrated by putting them in this bucket of water so that they do not dry out now this is a very important step and while it may seem obvious a lot of us actually overlook this step so this is the root ball of the plant and what you do is just immerse the plant into the water and what happens now is that the plant which has been starving for a long time now starts drinking all that water so the containers you see here are pretty large containers and I got them at my local Costco for a cheap price you could go with any container that you want now in preventing your containers there is an important step of creating the holes that will act as the drainage holes for your plant now in large containers its very important that you have a lot of drainage holes now for the potting mix recipe I use a pretty much standard potting mix recipe that you can see on your screen and you can tweak a little bit of this potting mix to get what do you want so for example if you have less beat mars but more compost you can go ahead and substitute add a little bit more compost that's perfectly fine what I'm doing here is taking one part of peat moss adding in one part of perlite Now instead of perlite you could also use vermiculite it's the same porous medium that adds drainage to your plants and then I'm adding one part of compost this is the EcoScraps branded compost it's of a very high quality one the best compost that I can recommend now I did run short of my compost the bagged compost so here's some of my own compost that I'm using so I do prepare my own compost and as you can see here a little bit is unfinished but that's okay now after adding a little bit of soil I make sure that I water the container simply because it's really hard to water the container once its full so I just add the soil in layers kind of settle down make sure it settles down very evenly at the base You can see the container's draining really well And I also added a little bit of Garden Lime now Blackberries prefer acidic to slightly basic soil however adding a little bit of garden lime does help and now let's look at planting the bush the Blackberry Bush must be planted around the beginning of spring early spring I'm doing that in February here and just make a little bit of a small hole and then plant your plant just like that make sure it's secure there are no air pockets around it and when you water your plant the air pockets will go away So in about 20 days you can see some nice green growth in the plants and that means that you're planting of this plant was successful And in about 25 days you will see that the shoots will keep emerging they will keep growing and this is again a good sign it shows that your plant has well established roots now and it will continue to grow these shoots or these canes that will eventually become your blackberry bush so sixty days since planting you can see that there is a lot more growth the plant has been responding very well to the weather conditions as it gets warmer the plant is gonna grow bigger and nicer and after 90 days this is the time that you can start seeing flowers in your plant and those are some pretty flowers the canes are also growing pretty well here is a closeup of those flowers that will eventually produce the blackberries and 120 days since planting you can actually see the berries now the berries have started forming along the canes now some people say that berries are not formed in the first year my experience has been different you can see these lovely berries being formed in the first year itself and these will eventually become darker and juicier when they're ready for harvest In about 127 days you can see a lot of berries here formed in clusters and this is a very small plant it's in a container hardly takes up any space and is growing pretty well Now as far as fertilizer go if you're applying organic fertilizers they must be applied in fall however if you're using synthetic fertilizers they should be applied during springtime because they're faster acting and make sure you get one of the fertilizer that are listed on your screen so that you get optimal blackberries So our first harvest time has come in June And as you can see these blackberries have become nice juicy and they come off the plant pretty easily when they'r eripe so that's a good indication You can see another cluster of blackberries here and one of the tips for harvesting blackberries is that when the blackberries become ripe they will first turn shiny and then they will sort of lose their luster a little bit So if you look at some these very ripe berries they will lose their shine in a few days and they will be very sweet once thats accomplished So this you can see here are pretty ripe blackberries and they are absolutely sweet and delicious Now if your blackberries are not sweet it usually means that you don't have enough Sun Blackberries need 6 plus hours of Sun every day to produce nice juicy and delicious berries Happy Gardening!