Blackberry Facts For Kids

Blackberry is a sweet, dark fruit that grows on many kinds of shrubs in the rose family. People pick blackberries to eat fresh, bake into pies, or make jams because they are juicy and flavorful. Scientists put these plants in the Rubus group, but naming them can be tricky because different kinds sometimes cross with one another.

Blackberry plants can make a lot of fruit. On a good farm, a field might produce as much as about 20,000 pounds per acre in a year. That large harvest makes growing blackberries interesting to farmers who sell fruit to stores and markets.

Blackberries grow on bushes with long canes that come back year after year from the same roots. The plants are called perennial because the root lives many years. The canes are biennial, which means each cane has two main years: first it grows tall, then the next year it makes flowers and fruit.

The first-year shoots, called primocanes, can grow about 3–6 metres (10–20 feet) and usually do not flower. In the second year the floricane makes the flower branches and the berries. Many wild kinds have sharp curved thorns, though gardeners now grow thornless types. If left alone, blackberries form thick, tangled patches, but people can train them on trellises to keep them neat.

Blackberries are common in fields, woods edges, and roadsides across many regions. Their thick patches provide hiding places for small animals and birds. The plants spread easily because branches that touch the ground can root and make new plants, and roots can send up new shoots called suckers. This makes blackberry patches grow bigger year after year if people do not cut them back.

Many animals eat blackberry fruit, including small birds and mammals, and caterpillars feed on the leaves. In places where a non-native blackberry has escaped gardens, it can crowd out other plants and be called invasive. People then work to remove or manage those patches so native plants can grow again.

People have bred blackberries for better fruit for more than a century. One early and famous hybrid is the loganberry, created in 1880 in Santa Cruz, California by crossing a blackberry with a raspberry. Later, plant breeders mixed different kinds to make new tasty varieties. The marionberry, often called Marion, comes from careful crosses that include other named plants such as 'Olallie'.

In the United States, breeding programs—especially in Oregon—worked to make berries that are larger, firmer, and easier to pick by machine. Early thornless bushes sometimes lost some flavor, but newer programs from the 1990s onward produced thornless and trailing types with better taste and higher yields. Some modern cultivars have names like 'Black Diamond', 'Black Pearl', 'Nightfall', 'Obsidian', and 'Metolius'.

Thornless blackberries are types of blackberry plants that have very few or no sharp thorns. Farmers and gardeners began growing many thornless varieties in the early 2000s because they are easier and safer to pick, and machines can harvest them more quickly. Some well-known thornless varieties are 'Black Diamond', 'Black Pearl', and 'Nightfall'.

These plants are also called cultivars — that means people carefully bred them to have certain good traits, like sweeter fruit or sturdier stems. Gardeners often choose varieties such as 'Loch Ness' and 'Loch Tay' because they won awards for being reliable and pretty in a garden.

Erect blackberries grow mostly straight up like small bushes instead of sprawling on long canes. The University of Arkansas bred many erect types that are not as wild-growing as other kinds, but they can still spread by new roots that start near the main plant. Famous erect varieties include 'Navaho', 'Ouachita', 'Cherokee', 'Apache', 'Arapaho', and 'Kiowa'.

Some modern plants are called primocane fruiters. That means they can make fruit on new canes the same year the cane grows. Examples are 'Prime-Jan' and 'Prime-Jim'. This helps farmers get fruit sooner and can give a longer harvest season.

Mexico became a very large producer of fresh blackberries in the early 2000s, and by 2017 it supplied most of the blackberries imported fresh into the United States. Chile is also important, especially for frozen blackberries — in 2017 it supplied a big share of frozen imports.

Growers in Mexico moved from older types like 'Brazos' to a newer one called 'Tupy', which came from crossing an erect variety named 'Comanche' with a wild Uruguayan blackberry. In warm places without cold winters, farmers sometimes use safe plant treatments to make bushes drop leaves and then grow and bloom at the right time for fruit.

Anthracnose is one of the diseases that can make blackberry branches weak and make fruit ripen unevenly. Farmers use careful pruning, clean planting stock, and sometimes a traditional spray called Bordeaux mixture (lime, water, and a tiny bit of copper) to help protect plants. The best prevention is growing healthy bushes: pull weeds between rows, remove suckers and grasses, and start with certified disease-free plants.

There are also insect pests. The spotted-wing drosophila lays eggs in soft fruit, and aphids like the blackberry aphid can weaken plants. Other pests include raspberry beetle, raspberry moth, and strawberry blossom weevil. Farmers watch fields closely and use methods that keep fruit safe to eat.

Blackberry fruit are tasty and used in lots of foods and drinks. People cook them into jams and jellies to spread on bread. They are also yummy in pies, crumbles, and other desserts, often mixed with strawberries or apples. In some places blackberries are even turned into wines and sweet liqueurs or cordials for special occasions.

Blackberries also appear in culture and history. Archaeologists find signs that people have eaten and used them for a very long time. Leaves, stems, and bark were used in traditional medicine by different groups, and the plants made natural dyes for cloth and hair. The thorny bushes were sometimes planted as living fences to protect gardens, animals, and homes.