Wild Blackberries

It is the time of year blackberries are blooming here in central Missouri and the fruits are just beginning to develop where the flowers have been pollinated. Blackberries have very attractive flower clusters and their habit of suckering everywhere means they make excellent hedges.

Blackberries beginning to bloom 2+ weeks ago

On our farm we have some large stands of native wild blackberries in overgrown pastures. We have left almost all of them and now actively manage them for berry production. Combined they are approximately 1/3 of an acre, which is about all the blackberries we can pick during the period they are ripening. To manage wild patches we took a narrow bushhog (4ft) and cut paths through the patches in the fall, then cut those same spots in the spring, then we will mow them again right before harvest. In the fall we also seeded the paths with a mix of crimson and white Ladino clover just to add some nitrogen to the areas and to give us a groundcover. We left the rows where the blackberries are growing uncut and we left them approximately 3 feet wide, since these have thorns on them we don't want to have to reach very far into them to get berries. This left us with aisles cut through the patch that are 4 ft, followed by a row of berries that is 3 ft wide, followed by another 4ft aisle, and then another 3ft wide berry row, and on and on. The length of the rows and aisles is simply based on whatever the length of the wild patches are, some are 20 feet long, others are 40+. After the summer harvest we will let the back berries grow back into the rows we cut last fall and we will cut the areas down that we harvested from this summer. This is to eliminate old canes, encourage new growth, and make harvesting easier.

Wild blackberries leave a lot to be desired in terms of size, consistency, etc, but since they take almost no time to manage, if you have a market for them and you have the time to pick them, then go for it.

Grafting season May 2018

When you graft a tree you have a root stock and a scion from at least one other tree and you take advantage of the way plants and trees grow to connect them together. This can have big advantages for the grower because there are many species of plants and trees that do not come 'true' from seed, which means every seedling will be atleast a  little different from it's parents. This can be a disadvantage if you need fruits or nuts, or any other crop to produce in a reliable way year after year, or have a consistent size fruit, nut, etc. So by grafting you can take an orchard of trees grown from seeds that are all very different from each other and you can make the tops of them the same. Your roots and sometimes the lower part of the trunk will still be the 'seedling', but the top of the tree that is producing fruit or nuts will be what you grafted. This is just my simplified grafting explanation and some things can be different in some situations.

Spring is traditionally a good time for many different kinds of grafts. This spring I focused on grafting many pecan trees at our farm. These were mostly wild pecan trees that were between 5-20 feet tall. Almost all of them were bark grafted. For more information on bark grafting pecan trees it is very hard to beat Bill Reid's northern pecan blog as a reference. Most of the pecan trees I grafted were to the variety 'Kanza'. I also grafted some to 'Major' and 'Yates 68' and a few others. Next year when many more of our pecan sprouts are larger I will be grafting many more to these varieties and a few others. We focus on grafting only pecan varieties that are currently very pecan scab resistant because there are excellent scab resistant varieties out there right now and it will be one less disease/pest we will have to worry about.

Peach scion beginning to break bud grafted onto an American plum rootstock

Another common species we have around our farm are different species of wild native plums - mostly American plums. There is some research indicating that as long as you are willing to prune off the prolific suckers which will occur from the ground - using American plums as a rootstock can be a great way to have a very hardy and naturally dwarfing rootstock to graft peaches onto. You will notice in the picture above the peach scion is just beginning to break bud. When I start seeing the leaves fully unfurl I will go in with pruning shears and cut off all leaves and growth below the scion to ensure the rootstock does not out compete the scion.