Blackberry Beginnings

ProfessorRoush received an unusual offer a couple of weeks back;  an offer via email from Tom Doyle himself to grow and promote Doyle's Thornless Blackberry™ plants.   Specifically, Mr. Doyle offered some free plants and a host of other inducements in exchange for a few blogs on the blackberries' performance, including a 10% commission on sales directed to his nursery.  As you know, what I share on this blog is written for my own enjoyment and I've declined Google Ads on the blog and don't look to make money off of its viewers, so I turned down his offer of income from sales.  I was, however, intrigued by his description of the vigor and high yield of the patented blackberry plants, and flattered by his awareness of Garden Musings, so after a little negotiation Tom did send the plants and other gifts, and I'll be writing a few blogs over a couple of years to tell you my experiences with them.

The Doyle Blackberries are from a small, family-owned blackberry nursery in Washington, Indiana, and, small nursery or not, I've got to give the Doyle's credit for reaching out into the social media world for marketing. The original Thomas Doyle passed in 2001 at over 100 years old, so I presume the individual contacting me is his son, Thomas E. Doyle, Junior, carrying on the family business.  In the fifteen or so years I've been blogging, only one other firm has offered any item for evaluation and, while I recognize Garden Musings isn't taking the non-gardening world by storm, it DOES average around 3000 visits each day.  So, my mouth watering for future blackberries, my ego deftly stroked, and to help out a fellow Hoosier, I'll happily lend a few words here.  Besides, you know how I love blackberries and trying another variety is a treat all by itself.

The plants were shipped soon after we reached agreement, and then I was left to fret while their original 3-day UPS trip turned into 8 days, and during the hottest time of the summer!  However, my concerns were misplaced because the nursery plans for a 15 day delay in shipping and planting and packaged them accordingly.  Four small but healthy rooted plants arrived in good condition, peanut-cushioned to protect everything from mayhem, along with a copy of Rose Doyle's Blackberry Recipies, a very nice T-shirt, liquid fertilizer, mycorrhizal root booster, a proprietary trellis, trellis clips, fertilizer, and other items, many of which you can see pictured here.  Rose Doyle's Blackberry Recipes alone is worth obtaining, with 186 pages of recipes that use blackberries for everything from Blackberry Chicken to Blackberry Brandy and on to Blackberry & Cantaloup Salsa!  NOTE:  If  you order from Doyle's, use the code DTB527JR for 10% off.  I get no commission, you get a larger discount!

In fact, one could accept the shipping delay as God's Will, since the plants arrived at the end of the hottest stretch of weather we've had.  I unpacked them, watered them, and waited through one more 90ºF+ day of  highs and then planted them Thursday, July 31st, just as we begin an unusually cool period of 70's and 80's predicted for the next week.  

They're protected as best I can for now behind fencing from rabbits and rodents, and mulched with prairie hay squares on either side.   I've warned Mr. Doyle that, as tough as he claims his blackberries are, they're now in Kansas and they'll be field-tested and tried to their limits.  Drought, rodents, coyotes, searing sun, frozen winters, they'll experience it all here.  As the Doyle nursery 19 month plant warranty covers everything except a soil pH outside of 5-6.5, I will, however, apologize in advance for my pH 7.2-8.5 prairie soil, but there's little I can do about that.  And I haven't unpacked the Trellis yet; the plants won't be big enough to need it for awhile.

I would be remiss if I didn't repeat, here at the outset, the advertised qualities of Doyle's Thornless Blackberry®, and share the contact information for the nursery.  Doyle's Blackberry is a trailing plant grown on grape-type trellises, produce 10-20 GALLONS of large and exceptionally sweet blackberries/plant, are hardy to Zone 3, and are featured in the Agricultural Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Kansas.  Production is reportedly slow in the first year but reaches normal in the 3rd year after planting, and the plant is a biennial, canes fruiting in the second year, and so it should be pruned accordingly.  Doyle Blackberry, Inc. is located at 1600 Bedford Road, Washington, IN  47501 and can be reached at (812) 254-2654 or via the website at www.fruitsandberries.com

For now, the plants are out there in the midst of my Kansas prairie, protected as best I can from critters and drought.   They'll have to do the rest!

Earth's Bounty, Garden's Beauty

ProfessorRoush hasn't blogged, he knows, for quite a while during this busy June, but while the blog may suffer, the garden is never far from my mind.  Nearly every morning and evening I'm there, watering or worrying, watching and waiting.   Watering the new plants, and sometimes old, as we settle in to a very dry summer.   Worrying about that struggling new Rugosa hybrid and watching diligently for the first Japanese Beetles.  Waiting for the daylilies to bloom, for the rain to come, and for the heat to break.

It's been hot, friends, hot like late July, far too early now in June to see the ground crack and the forsythia wilt.  And a month since significant rain, a drizzle here or there, dried on the cement before I can don my shoes.  I water strawberries and tomatoes, petunias and pots on regular rotation, pouring hope onto the soil carried gallon by gallon from the house to the garden.  But nothing grows at temperatures over  100ºF.  Tomatoes don't bloom, daylilies drop buds, and the roses, oh the roses, pout like the garden prima donnas they are.  The garden is static, in summer stasis, waiting on cool September to save it.

Still, there is beauty in the garden, and bounty to find.  Some plants, like the Prickly Poppy (Argemone polyanthemos) at the right, defy the heat, producing these impossibly delicate blossoms in defiance of the searing sun, the poppies of heaven, set down on earth.  Here is the beauty for me to behold, a wild weed given a home for my pleasure and a grocery for the ungainly bumblebees wallowing in the petals.  That bumble in the top photo, a plump glutton of industry, is surely going to please his friends, bearing baskets of pollen to feed the hive.  The luscious blackberries in the second photo, they're for me, first, and then perhaps Mrs. ProfessorRoush if any of the purple pleasures survive the walk to the house.  It's a dicey thing, showing up at the house with stained empty hands, purple mouth, and a smile, one's life spared only by inches and whim.  But that the photo of the blackberries makes you want to reach into it and fill your hands, doesn't it?  Imagine how good they were out in the garden, fresh off the bramble, warm and juicy, the taste of sunshine in every drupe.   Any just jury would stay my execution on the promise of a future handful.

There is, too, in the garden at many corners, feasts for the soul, saving sights for sun-seared eyes.   My gentleman rabbit comes calling, a cheerful lily over a concrete shoulder.   Blanc Double de Coubert, jealous of the angelic pristine poppy, attempts a second bloom cycle, not quite as white, but more fragrant and visible against the dark green foliage.  Panicled hydrangeas begin to bloom, Russian sage forms a mound of airy blue, and everywhere grasses stretch to the sky.  

Blood-red Asiatic lilies have budded and bloomed, giving way now to Orientals and Orientpets.  And yet, I wait still on the daylilies, the main event of the Kansas summer, aliens become dominant in an unforgiving landscape, every view become a fleeting festival of color, a riot of shapes and sizes.  They're beginning to pop up now, a yellow note here, a purple there, a symphony sure to come as summer has arrived.   

Blackberry Bounty

It's Blackberry time here in Kansas!  It's Blackberry time here in Kansas! 

There should be a song written to the wonders of blackberries here in the Flint Hills, a boisterous song to rouse the spirit and whet the palate.  Many fruits are iffy in these dry, thinly-covered hills, but blackberries are usually not among them. The peach crop can be wiped out with an inopportune freeze, strawberries die with the droughts, the watermelons and cantaloupes survive only at the mercy of the squash bugs, and grapes can disappear overnight as the June Bugs arrive, but blackberries, oh blackberries, usually can be counted for a fresh, sweet beginning to the summer.  Okay, maybe except for last year.


I grow a number of blackberries varieties, in theory, but I may be down to one or at most two varieties in reality.  I originally began with a row of thornless 'Arapaho', 'Navaho', 'Black Satin', and 'Cherokee', but those original plants have dwindled with crown gall and I've moved suckers everywhere to grow in other areas, so it's entirely possible that I've ended up with only one of the original cultivars (probably 'Navaho', which seemed the most vigorous) and certainly no more than two of that group.  This year I'm making a concerted effort to provide these thornless varieties some deep watering at intervals (economically, with soaker hoses), in an attempt to improve the number of canes and the harvest.

A couple of years ago, the University of Arkansas released some varieties that fruit on primocanes as well as the floricanes.  Hoping to get two harvests each year of blackberries, I purchased three plants each of Prime-Jim, Prime-Jan (both 2 years old) and Prime-Ark 45 (a yearling) to try.  Of the former two, Prime-Jim seems to be the better variety for the Flint Hills.  It is a thorned variety, but the canes are stiff and erect, not trailing and grabbing at everything in sight like the old classic varieties.   This year, my three Prime-Jim plants have many, many more berries than Prime-Jan, and they are ripening at a quick pace and all at one time.  There are so many berries on Prime-Jim that I don't even care what the second harvest is like because the first out-does any other blackberry I've seen.  Prime-Ark 45, which is said to be the best producer and have the largest berries, is not old enough yet for me to evaluate, and it has been at a disadvantage anyway, putting on most of its current growth during late summer of last year in the midst of a drought. 

I suppose I should expect hybrid blackberries to do well in an environment where wild blackberries grow up everywhere that is not mowed, burned, or otherwise treated, but one can never be sure what evils man may have created during the "improvement process."  Except for a little bacterial crown gall, blackberries are normally trouble-free for me.  In fact, my only problem with blackberries is that I rarely harvest enough of them to use in jam or jelly.  My family tends to eat them off the vine, unwashed, but oh so warm and sweet (the berries, not the family), as fast as they ripen on the canes.  Blackberries stain us, and sustain us, until the main garden bounty comes with summer.