Re-thinking a blackberry patch
Our relationship with the blackberries in our backyard has been a lesson in appreciating the abundance of what it is. We planted these berries a few years ago before our daughter was born. When we were designing the Learning Garden these berries were not in the design. They were thorny, using some of the best sun, and taking up potential real estate from our vision of fruit trees espaliered around the entire fence. The minimally producing berries (at the time!) were a nuisance and the plan was to remove them.
However, these berries have since become the heart and soul of our baby daughter’s daily life, and they also started growing more vigorously. At a year-and-a-half old, she’s already distinguishing blackberries from other berries in books by their leaf and berry shape, exclaiming in delight and pointing outside when she sees them. When she wakes up in the near dark morning, she’s already giving me the fruit sign in sign language and pointing out the door to see if there are any ripe berries.
The berries have mysteriously been producing a few berries at a time all through the summer, all through the fall, and now, all through the winter. The plants are creating numerous shoots and seems to be thriving in our windy sandy beach climate where nothing else seems to want to live.
One day, it occurred to me: why am I trying to place this sweet, delicious, coveted fruit that seems to love my yard with something else that I have deemed “better” for no real reason? Not only do I have no idea yet if this new fruit will like or grow well on our site, I hadn’t even chosen what fruit it would be.
The more I thought about it, the more my thinking strikes me as a microcosm of the kind of thinking that most of us are going through all day long: There’s something better out there, and when we replace it with whatever-that-thing-is-that-is-not-as-good, our lives will be better too. But that hungry thinking never ends.
We decided to keep the berries, and in fact, we decided to plant companions for them. One practice of gardening that I’ve learned is to observe what’s growing well in your site and plant it’s relative or more of it.
We now have two varieties of blackberries: Ollalieberries and a thornless variety. We also just planted two varieties of raspberries: Caroline and Shortcake.
This weekend, we put some care into our new berry patch, moving some of the earlier planted blackberries closer to the fence, cutting them back, and tying the canes up neatly on our trellis. As we dug up the one oldest plant, it was beautiful to see the huge fat earth worms weaving in and out of the coiled roots. It was also beautiful to unearth the tiny pale magenta shoots of new canes that will hopefully bear new fruit in seasons to come.
