Blackberries are delicious little berries that grow on bushes. While it’s fun and cost-effective to grow your own blackberries at home, if you don’t know how to propagate them, you’ll end up spending a fortune on new blackberry plants every time you want to plant one.
The good news is that the propagation process is a breeze once you get the hang of it. In this guide, we take you through how to propagate blackberries. We also cover what these berries are and how you can get started with the best blackberry plants.
Understanding Blackberry Propagation
If it’s been a while since you’ve taken your last Earth science class, you may be confused about what propagation is, and we completely understand. However, before you learn the necessary steps to propagate blackberries, it’s important to understand what the process is. This will help the propagation steps make a lot more sense later on.
When it comes to blackberry propagation, and all propagation, really, you’ll find that it’s a way to create plants from existing ones. Essentially, you’re using seeds or canes, in the case of blackberries, to create entirely separate and new plants. You’ll find that this is how new plants are born in nature, and it’s also a great way to grow new blackberry plants.
Of course, you don’t have to simply let nature do all the work. When you need to, you can encourage blackberry propagation by bending canes or by using cuttings. It’s also important to note that the propagation process helps you duplicate existing plants that you love.
How to Propagate Blackberries
Once you understand what the propagation process is, you can begin the process. The best part is that you can propagate blueberries in two different ways, and one of them is pretty simple because it’s mostly all-natural. Learn about the best ways to propagate blackberries below.
How to Propagate Blackberries By Layering
The first way to propagate blackberries is to simply let the blackberry plants themselves do all the work. After all, who wants to waste their time working if they don’t have to, right? If you let a blackberry grow too long in the summer, something very interesting starts to happen.
You’ll notice that the blackberries will start to tip and bend over; it’s almost like the blackberries will look for their own place to plant some new roots.
After the blackberry plant settles in its new home, you can cut the link between them, and then you have yourself a new blackberry plant. If you want to use this method, we recommend leaving enough space between the blackberries for them to grow into one another.
Of course, you can also force this process by choosing a long and flexible cane to bend and place in the ground next to the plant. Therefore, you can speed nature up a little bit if you have to.
How to Propagate Blackberries with Cuttings
One of the most common ways to propagate blackberries is through using hardwood cuttings. This method is a lot more complicated than layering, but the results are about the same.
- Use pruning shears to grab around 10 inches of cuttings from any non-fruiting canes that you have.
- Remove most of the leaves from the cuttings.
- Plant your cuttings in a hole that’s around 2-3 inches deep; make sure some of the leaf nodes are below the surface of the ground.
- Make sure the soil remains moist.
- Focus on using indirect sunlight to promote growth
If you follow these steps, you shouldn’t have any issues using cuttings to propagate blackberries.
Understanding How to Propagate Blackberries
Propagating blackberries is a great way to end up with more blackberries, especially if you have a lot of land. While this may be the case, you still have to start somewhere, right? If you don’t have a blackberry plant to start with or you want to jumpstart the propagation process, the good news is that plenty of great online retailers will send blackberry bushes right to your door.
That said, if you want to work with the best, we recommend sourcing your blackberries from Best Blackberry Bushes. This ensures that you have blackberry plants that are worth propagating.