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Black raspberries have crept up on our property. No complaints. I love it. I found them today when I was clearing an overrun area. Hacked around them.
I have red raspberries in front of the house and don't have a problem with wandering vines but these black ones seem to be wandering all over the place. The red ones are bushy.
Does anyone have experience with these? Can I make them bushier or contain them so that they propagate in a a contained area?
I've had them at a couple homes and they grow around here locally in hedgerows or places that have been allowed to grow wild. I've never gotten them to be bushy but the first house where we had them was pre-internet. They were confined to one corner of the yard and I just hacked off any that tried to escape. We did get to eat some of the berries, if proper precautions were taken against the thorns. The ones that come up in my current yard seem to materialize out of nowhere, grow so fast you can practically watch the canes lengthening, and any berries that appear get eaten by birds long before they're ripe. Plus, thorns. So, since they're uninvited guests, I cut them back.
Maybe this will help, maybe it would have helped me years ago, too. Plant Low-Maintenance Blackberries - Organic Gardening - MOTHER EARTH NEWS
Yummmm. OUr wild ones are sort of a bush, very much like red raspberries. But as hard to direct as the red ones are. I think the domestic versions of red and black raspberries and blackberries are quite different. And not nearly as tasty. We are just beginning to eat wild raspberries. :)
I asked my husband whose childhood home we live in about them. He said they used to be there all the time when he was a kid. I'm so happy they came back but now realize that the "blackberries" I ate when I was a kid were in fact loganberries. These are tiny by comparison! I'm still excavating them. There's a bunch of other stuff in there and I have to be careful I don't run across poison oak again. I will be so happy if they do their thing and I can tame them, so to speak.