Even though blackberry plants were not on our radar this year, we found such a great deal on them that we couldn’t resist picking up five healthy plants to plant.
At the farmers market last week, one of the Amish families was selling blackberry plants that they had dug up that morning. The blackberry plants were healthy and ready to be put in the ground. I got five plants for just $10. The same five plants would have cost me over ten times as much for the same Triple Crown thornless blackberries. We bought them on Saturday and then planted them on Sunday.
For the planting location of our blackberries, we decided to plant the blackberry plants close to the garden area because we wanted to make watering them as handy as watering the garden. We planted them in a location in the full sun. We planted them in rows going east to west which allowed them to have access to the full sun all day long. We planted them in a straight line along the ridge for another reason too. We planted them in a way we could offer them support which I will explain later in this post.
My husband dug the holes and the two of us amended the soil in the holes with some organic amendments including mycorrhizal fungi so that the plants would more quickly adapt to the surrounding environment.
The blackberries were planted to the same depth to which they had been previously growing. Once they were planted, I mulched them with cardboard and then used small chunks of wood to hold the cardboard in place. We didn’t water them because it had rained the night before and it was going to rain the following night as well.
Cleaning Out the Chicken House
I always like combining projects to complete so I decided to clean out the chicken house and use the nitrogen and carbon-rich material on the blackberries.
Once the blackberries were planted and mulched with cardboard, we knew that we needed to cover the cardboard with another type of mulch. We could have used grass clippings, but since we had to clean out the chicken house anyway, we had used pine shavings in the chicken house. Pine shavings are acidic so I knew that this chicken house litter was perfect to use for mulching the blackberries.
Because it was raining and I couldn’t do much else, I went to the feed store on Monday to pick up new shavings to replace the shavings in the chicken house. By using this chicken manure enabled me to kill two birds with one stone. I cleaned out the chicken house and mulched the blackberries. On Tuesday evening, I replaced the old shavings in the chicken house with the new ones and used the used shavings and the chicken manure to finish mulching the blackberries. Once the manure was in place, we topped the bed off with grass clippings from our yard.
Providing Supports
Once the blackberries were mulched, it was time to support them. Supporting the blackberries will not only make it easier for us to harvest the berries when they ripen, but it also allows for good airflow which prevents various plant diseases.
We put up a fence on the south side of the blackberry plants. We placed the posts south of the plants and the wire on the north side of the posts between the posts and the plants. This way, the blackberry plants leaned against the wire and the wire leaned against the posts because the plants would lean toward the sun in the south.
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