For the past 15 years, we’ve been growing blackberries on our wire trellis and I can honestly say that I’d never grow them any different way. Although the flowering season this year was incredible late and it started 40 days later than usual, due to the lots of sun and warmth, blackberries managed to catch up and my first blackberry harvest was only a week later than usual. 

In normal years I harvest my blackberries in the first week of July and this year the harvest was in the second week, which is excellent knowing they were flowering in late May. 

There’s no doubt that the wire trellis helped a lot. Fruits are exposed to warmth and sun and this speeded up the process I the fruits.

Trellis can be a wonderful thing in the garden. My berries take much less space than they would on poles or as a bush, they are much easier to harvest and there are much fewer blackberries needed for a much bigger harvest. Since the canes are tied on the wires they can be bent in any direction and cover more space than when just left to grow upwards. Upwards the canes would be around the height of the gardener and this way some of my canes are over 5m long. I had two trellises in the garden and this year we actually downsized to only one because the amount was too much for us and they were starting to be too much work. Now on this wire trellis, I have only 5 blackberries, and the way they are tied they will most likely give around 25kilos of fruits. 

I’ve started my harvests this week and I’ve already harvested 1 kilo of fruits and this is just the beginning.

But it’s not joy with the trellis. There’s one problem with them and that’s the harvesting time. Blackberries on trellis need to be harvested very often, especially if the temperatures are over 30°C(86°F) in that kind of heat blackberries should be harvested every 24h or they get sunburned and start turning white.

The exposure of the fruit to high temperatures and low moisture will cause white drupelets. When temperatures reach 30°C the dry hot air allows the UV rays to penetrate the fruits directly and cook the fruits from the inside. Usually, the white drupelets are scattered on the fruits showing the spots where the rays penetrated the fruits, but when having them on trellis one side of the fruits is always protected by the leaves and this causes grouped one-sided whiting. You can actually see how they turn white over just a couple of hours, especially if temperatures are over 35°C(95°F).

Watering or creating a water mist can help the berries, raising the moisture will raise the temperature threshold needed to damage the fruits, but this can also trigger powdery mildew and early blight if the leaves don’t have time to dry before the sun hits them, this can be an even bigger problem on blackberries than the whiteness of the fruits, especially if the berries are not treated like mine and 100% organic. 

That’s why they need to be harvested every day, preferably in the early morning before the sun hits them, if they are harvested in the evening there’s a chance that the nearly black fruits could possibly turn white before the harvest. If harvested in the morning the leftover fruits will not ripe enough to start turning white during the hottest part of the day. Instead, they will ripe in the late afternoon and will be perfect for harvest in the morning.

Although trellis will certainly make us harvest more often I prefer this over the search for the blackberries inside the bush. This way that can be harvested by anyone and the fruits are perfectly visible which will certainly shorten the harvest process, and we all know harvesting berries takes time.