Taking a bowl into the late summer garden and picking through the raspberries and blackberries was a lovely reality back in Switzerland. I had planted fall raspberries and thornless blackberries that grew into vigorous shrubs intent on taking over the world and delivering countless luscious berries from late summer well into December.
Down here, so far that hasn’t worked out yet. It may be different in the nearby hills but at 50 masI it may simply be too hot and too dry for berries.
Thorny thickets of bramble blackberries do thrive here in a lot of places. In fact we had a whole jungle of them covering a tamarix tree when we arrived. They do produce lots of berries but their taste is different from year to year. In 2023 they were fantastic and I gathered bucketfuls to freeze. But in the year before and after they tasted totally bland and unappealing.
In order to have my own berries in the garden, I installed a berry bed in the late fall of 2023 – behind the yew hedge, where the plants would be sheltered from the sun until the afternoon. The bed was filled with good soil mixed with compost and guano and surrounded with a deep root barrier to keep the berries from escaping into the garden – and to keep the yew from accessing the water the berries get. The berries are watered deeply twice a week and the get horse manure in the fall.
I planted a thornless blackberry variety “Loch Ness” that grew quite vigorously (though much less vigorous than in Switzerland). The first summer it produced three berries. Now, in its second summer, it has lots of berries ripening, but most of them are pretty small.
I also planted two late-fruiting raspberries, “Autumn First” and “Heritage”. They developed slowly, one of them produced a handful of small berries in the fall, the other one developed some sort of illness and died off. This year they are both back – more or less – but no flowers or fruit are yet visible.
Because I read in a regional Facebook gardening group that Loganberries and Tayberries may be more heat and drought resistant, I planted one of both as well. They are developing pretty slowly, the Tayberry has a few, rather tart berries this summer, the Loganberry is younger and probably needs another year to fruit.
This fall I will decide whether to keep the berry experiment going or give away the plants and go for some more typically Mediterranean fruit.
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