I’VE never planted blackberries in my garden— at least, not until four years ago. I’m a country boy and I don’t see the point of cultivating a plant that’s widely available in the wild.
Over the years, one gets to know the good stretches of blackberries in fields and hedgerows—the ones with large fruits or superior flavour and the ones whose crop comes early in the season.
A friend of ours, a retired admiral, grows cultivated blackberries in his kitchen garden, duly manured, watered and trained along wires for easy picking, but he misses out on the fun of picking wild blackberries for free.
That’s the reason I can’t really explain why I planted a cultivated blackberry in the spring of 2014. I was thinking about soft fruit for our new garden and went to a garden centre to look at raspberries and currants, but the blackberry was in a pot and going for half price, so I thought it might be worth trying. It’s called Rubus Loch Ness, and I discovered later that it’s one of the few that carry an Award of Garden Merit from the RHS.
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