Blackberry update.

Earlier in the year I blogged about growing soft fruit such as Blackberries and Tayberries etc. against a wall or fence. Now is a good time to give you an update as to what you need to be doing now as the more established plants will have put up new shoots that need to be trained in before they get out of control. They grow very fast so will need to be tied in every week to avoid them going somewhere they shouldn't. As you will see in the first picture one of the shoots is going behind a wire, if this was left much longer it would be hard to retieve it without breaking the tip of the shoot off as they are VERY brittle and the last thing you want to do is break the shoot. So this shoot was brought down and tied in to the wire. By the way the length of shoot pointing skywards was made during just one week so you can tell how quick the whole bush could get out of hand if not touched.

In the picture below you can see how the new shoots are being trained along the wires to the right, there is one shoot per wire and these shoots are the ones that will have the berries on next year, the shoots with this years crop are all to the left.