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A Berry of Another Color
Planting blackberries we got at a great price
I have had strawberries growing for a few years. I hadn’t really considered growing blackberries because they seemed so easy to harvest from the wild. We’d go out in the field next to our house and pick them, briars and all and come home and preserve our natural bounty. Year before last, a friend of ours invited us to harvest his tame thornless blackberries. They had been easier to pick and the berries were bigger so it didn’t take as many to fill our gallon jugs. The fact they were briarless was an added benefit. We had so many blackberries from his place that last year, we didn’t have to pick any blackberries.
This year, even though blackberry plants were not on our radar this year, we found such a great deal on them that we couldn’t resist picking up five healthy plants to plant.
At the farmers market last week, one of the Amish families was selling blackberry plants that they had dug up that morning. The blackberry plants were healthy and ready to be put in the ground. I got five plants for just $10. The same five plants would have cost me over ten times as much for the same Triple Crown thornless blackberries. We bought them on Saturday and then planted them on Sunday.