I recently got a question in our Skool community about blackberries in a food forest design:
I have a couple new blackberries and was wondering how to incorporate into my food forest. Can I plant them like between a triangle of fruit trees? Or does it need to have a whole space / fence to themselves?
Good question! Though a blackberry hedge or trellis can be more productive than just planting blackberries in the food forest, you definitely don’t have to grow them that way. We don’t. All we do is plant thornless blackberries here and there all around the food forest trees.
Like this:
We often bury the tips of blackberry plants to start more, too. Half the plants in our gardens came from that method.
You can see how we do it here:
Blackberries thrive along the edges of the woods – just pop them in here and there where you have at least half sunlight and they’ll give you plenty of berries.
Thorny varieties are better kept out of main walk areas. We have some really good thorny “Kiowa” blackberries in our Grocery Row Gardens and they have been really hard on the feet and legs. If I planted them in the food forest, I wouldn’t put them right under a tree I want to harvest, like the plum in the picture above. Instead, relegate your thorny blackberries to less calf-destroying locations!
We also leave quite a few wild dewberries in our food forest, more because they are almost impossible to eliminate than because we planned them in. Those we mow around to stop them from spreading too far. Every spring we get baskets of fruit, though, so their rambling, thorny, invasive nature gets a pass.
