How to grow giant blackberries

I have been gathering a bumper crop of enormous backberries in my garden over the last week. My British readers may be saying "So what!" In the UK blackberries are something of a problem, springing up in any patch of untended ground (and indeed in tended ground such as garden borders and hedges), but here in the Czech Republic I have observed that you are more likely to see wild raspberries than blackberries in the hedgerow.

I have an affection for blackberries that goes beyond my liking for backberry crumble. My affection for them is rooted in happy childhood memories of late summer afternoons harvesting blackberries with my mother. As I grew older, my mother stopped coming with me and instead handed me a plastic container and sent me off into the fields. Even now, with my mother in her late eighties I make a point every year of bringing her a tupperware box full of gleaming black fruit.

I learnt as a child that the best place to get bumper blackberries is where they are in the open but have their roots in a ditch, as they need both sunshine and water to thrive. Maybe this need for water is one reason why they are less frequent here in Czecho, as here the summers tend to be dryer.

The blackberry with its rich sweet smell and sweeter taste is so important to me in marking the seasons that I missed them when I came to this country. I therefore decided to plant some in my garden. My garden has the sun, but is even dryer and stony than most Czech gardens. How could I avoid growing hard seedy fruit? Answer: I took advice from an old Czech gardener and planted the blackberry bush downhill from the septic tank! 

Sharing the Garden

 

Having spent so long doing up my Czech house I am at last turning my attention to our enormous garden. Well, I say 'garden' it's really an overgrown orchard - very overgrown. As long-standing readers of my blog will be aware I started the hard process of mowing some of it a few years ago. At first my only option was to hand scythe, but each year I have managed to get more of it to a point where my electric strimmer can take some of the strain off my shoulder and arm muscles.  

The improvement is such that this year I decided to start planting some shrubs. My friend Hannah had always urged me to improve the garden. She was a great one for planting decorative shrubs and plants with edible fruit (very Czech) and what little was left of her busy life was spent gardening, including removing snails from her strawberries and throwing them over the fence. I pointed out that that was all very well if you are in the Czech Republic all the time, but I am not and so the battle against pests would be lost almost as soon as it began. Now with Hannah's death I found myself rethinking my position. With a large population of snails and ground riddled with mouseholes it was a no to strawberries and runnerbeans but more substantial shrubs might be possible.

I returned from the garden centre (Czech garden centres are very different to English ones - less flowers and more trees) with an aronia bush, two sea buckthorns (male and female to allow pollination), an edible amelianchior, raspberries, thornless blackberry and cranberry. After a day's digging the shrubs stood proud on a bank half way down the garden, where the blossom and bright fruit will be visible from the window by my desk.

A few days later I inspected the plants to discover that someone/thing had chewed the bark of my aronia. This was unexpected - snail damage on the raspberries yes, rabbit attack on the blackberry - but not a large shrub. Look closely at the photo above and you will see the culprit - a deer. I knew they regularly strip my plum trees of fruit on the lower branches, but I was not expecting them to eat bark in early summer. During the day I never see them in the orchard (this photo was taken at dawn from the window hence the lack of clarity), but I do see their droppings.

I checked the internet and discovered that the answer to this problem was human urine. Apparently they are scared off by human scent. So urine it was. I leave you to work out how it was delivered to the aronia bush!

Hutkin

I have blogged about the Czech chata or hutkins in the past. Many are set in the countryside, in woodland clearings and beside lakes and streams. But others are to be found like English allotments in the most unpromising of places, besides railway lines or on city wastelands. One of the joys of a trip on both an English and a Czech train is these flashes of human creativity and love of nature amid the ruin and bleakness of our cities, they give one hope for mankind these little Edens set in a sea of grey.

In Cesky Krumlov the other day I was walking by the river. On one side was the back of the Eggenberg Brewery, which away from the tourists' eyes was looking run-down, with blind and broken windows and trees growing from its gutters, on the other side cliffs of granite rose from the river up to the orbital road along which could be heard the growl of traffic making its way south. But here too was an Eden - a hutkin perched on a cliff, and a woman tending a garden carved into the granite. A few yards away was the road's tarmac and beyond that a factory tower, but she was with nature on her cliff.

I was reminded of a favourite track by the queen of English folk music June Tabor – A Place Called England. You can see it performed by June herself on Youtube . It strikes me that the English and the Czechs share a love of and a relationship with the soil and gardening, which is quite profound.