Purple Reign

For some reason, I’m annoyed when I stain my fingers with beets. For some reason, I love it when my fingers--and tongue and teeth and chin--turn purple from juicy blackberries.

Blackberries are brambles, part of the rose clan. There are more than 250 sorts of brambles, among them raspberries, wineberries, dewberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries, cloudberries--and briar roses. If you see a small, ancient, single-petaled white briar rose and a white blackberry blossom, you’ll at once perceive the connection.

It may be that a rose is a rose is a rose, but a blackberry is not always a blackberry. Sometimes fruits with blackberry heritage or fruits that appear blackberry-ish--cousin Himalaya berry, for instance--are lumped with the blackberries in catalogues. While names are inconsequential for good eating, we need names to be sure what we’ve enjoyed is what we plant.

While you plant blackberries in very early spring, I write about them now, since they’re coming into season. Make a sticky note for your new calendar. Between now and next March, do a little reading or nosing about with neighbors who grow blackberries. One thing you’ll learn: how important it is to suit the cultivar to your area. Happily, there are blackberries that will grow in every part of Southern California, and there are cultivars resistant to many bramble diseases and pests. I find a big part of successful gardening is ask, ask, ask.

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Where summers are warm and winters mild, grow berries with unsurpassed wild taste: small, deep-reddish-black Cascades are so delicate and juicy they don’t ship, so here’s another opportunity to grow flavor you can’t buy (to me, the whole point of a kitchen garden). Then, while you can buy Olallieberries, they’re considered the classic blackberry for every part of Southern California except cold-winter mountains and hot-summer deserts. Olallies are large, long, glossy black and sweet, yet touched with wild berry flavor. Bright-black Marion berries are similar to Olallies with greater yield.

Shiny, wine-dark Young berries will grow everywhere in Southern California (in frigid winters, lay canes on the ground and mulch with straw). Other vines may be more productive, but no blackberries are sweeter. Dusty, deep-red Boysenberries are not as sweet but are wonderfully scented. Thornless Boysens, by the way, seem to produce smaller fruit and less of it than those on thorny canes--this is true of the thornless form of Logans. Logans are reddish and tarter--and some think more flavorful--than Boysens.

Blackberries grow in two basic forms. Most cultivars for temperate regions are the trailing type, robust and thorny. In the landscape, trailing blackberries are great barriers-- nothing gets past them, not even raccoons. Encircle any patch of treasures with a hedge of trailing blackberries, or cross thin thorny canes over the likes of a ripening melon. Sometimes in August I can hear shrieks of frustration from the rackety coons.

Blackberries from trailing cultivars are best picked when the vines are looped on wires or sent up trellises. This is easier done than said--describing the technique is lengthy. I recommend “Louise Riotte’s Berries, Rasp and Black (Garden Way)” or the new “Sunset Western Garden Book” for details. Having said that, I must tell you I hate fussy chores and when I grow trailing blackberries, I tie up nothing. No, I couldn’t reach every berry, but yes, I got pleasure from admiring the canes lolling about the garden.

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Where winters are cold, plants with stiff upright canes are hardiest. That’s the sort we grow here in the mountains--they’re also best for the high desert. Cherokee, with large delectable shiny black berries, is a good choice. Shawnee, a Cherokee offspring, offers extra-large high-quality fruit on extra-productive canes. Upright plants create a fountain of reddish canes, and though a support is most efficient, I like their natural exuberance. Unless I’m cadging a few ripe berries as I pass by, for serious picking I put on thick clothing, a cap and leather gloves.

Blackberries grow handsomely in containers--allow one half-barrel per plant.

Birds are wretched around blackberries. Our patch is small, and there have been seasons when the birds have taken the whole crop. Since then, I’ve found the best defense is a big yellow balloon with a gleaming eye hung close by the berries and moved every few days. I’ve given up netting because each year a feisty bird pecks its way through, becomes trapped, and we both have a panicky time getting him/her out. The ideal solution would be to grow three times as many berries as we could eat, then pounce when the berries are ripe--two-thirds having been taken by the birds. But, as my husband says, we must reimburse them for their song.

Wait to pick blackberries until they’re ripe--they come easily off the stem. In much of Southern California, if you play the cultivars right, you can pick blackberries from late May to November. Most plants will yield for at least a couple of weeks.

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Blackberries are biennials. That means the first year of growth, the cane only produces leaves. The second year, it produces flowers and then berries. This is why you won’t have berries until the plants are 2 years old.

Once a cane has borne fruit, you must cut it to the ground--it will bear no further and soon die. Tuck pruning shears into your berry basket and do this thinning as you pick. You’ll at once free the plant’s energy for those canes in flower and fruit. If you wait and do this in autumn, before the plant goes dormant, it’s hard to work your way through a jungle looking for clues as to which have fruited. Too, when you cut down a cane immediately after its moment supreme , you’ll find a new shoot at its base--ah, dear yea-saying Mother Nature.

Once in spring, on a train in China, we fell to talking with a man from Australia. As we glided past thickets of wild blackberries, my mouth watering at the thought of the fruit, “Noxious weeds!” the man exclaimed. Lucky he wasn’t near the open window or my husband would have tossed him out.

It’s true that blackberries are rambunctious. They reproduce in three ways: from seeds, vine tips and runners. Any tip that touches the ground can sprout a root and start a plant. Runners are roots that scoot along underground then pop up wherever they please and send up a plant--and boy, can the runners run. They do this in the wild, where the flavor and quality of berries can be unsurpassed. But, unchecked, even one lusty blackberry will eventually consume a small garden, choking out other life.

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Too, bear in mind that if the plant puts energy into making plants, that’s less energy for making berries. Also, canes that grow thickly can fall prey to pests and diseases faster than those with ample sunlight and circulation of air. Unless you have boundless space, if healthy plants, easy picking and lots of luscious berries are your goal, pull up volunteers and snip off wandering tips of vines.

Blackberries are self-fertile, which means you don’t need another cultivar to get a crop. Set the plants in full sun and prepare the soil as for any perennial--some blackberries live 25 years (though when daytime temperatures are high, plants are relatively short-lived). Blackberries will grow on average soil as long as it’s well drained, but you’ll have the finest, most abundant fruit when the soil is rich in organic matter. Water so the soil stays constantly moist during the growing and fruiting season, and year-around, keep the plants mulched with several inches of aged manure so weeds are suppressed, moisture is retained and the hard-working canes are automatically fed. One well-established vigorous plant can give 10 or more pounds of berries each year.

And here I haven’t said a word about how to eat the incomparable fruit.

The best way is to kneel on the ground, pick all the sun-warmed ripe blackberries around you, pop them into your mouth, then lie down beside them, close your eyes and breathe in the earthy sweetness of the plants and listen to the insects buzzing. No berry you buy will taste as good. After contemplating your fine fortune, pick yourself up and move to the next cluster of ripe berries and repeat.

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The second best way to eat fragrant just-picked berries is to combine them in a coupe glass with equal-sized cubes of scented cantaloupe--a true European cantaloupe, such as the French Charentais, also ripe and sun-warmed from the garden. (Never serve ripe fruit cold, since the chill dulls the nuances of flavor.) A pinch of lavender blossoms adds mystery and more perfume.

The third best way to eat ripe blackberries is on a trencher of American pie pastry. Don’t make it a tart, don’t make it a pie, just fashion a disk of your favorite short pastry, and, warm from the oven, heap it so high with blackberries you couldn’t possibly pile on one more. Bring to the table--warm pastry, cool blackberries, icy vanilla-scented whipped cream and blackberry blossoms on top.

For the fourth to the hundredth best way to eat blackberries, you’ll have to catch me out of season when my mouth isn’t full.

Sources

Fresh local berries: From a farmers’ market.

Canes to plant: Ask a local nursery.

Or send for Boysen, Cascade, Logan and Marion (also Berries, Rasp and Black, berry wire) from Raintree Nursery, 391 Butts Road, Morton, Wash. 98356; Olallie, Cherokee and Shawnee from Pacific Tree Farms, 4301 Lynwood Drive, Chula Vista, Calif. 91910; Young from Country Carriage Nurseries, Box 548, Hartford, Me. 49507; bird “scare eye” balloons from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, Box 2209, Grass Valley, Calif. 95945.

Thompson can be reached via TimesLink e-mail at bubq86e. For information on TimesLink, call (800) 792-LINK, ext. 274.

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