Adding berry plants to your home landscape not only provides beauty and value to the scenery but also provides delicious homegrown food. Berry plants come in many sizes and varieties and are easy to grow. If you don’t like the taste of berries, planting them in your landscape for aesthetic purposes will provide food for native wildlife, so it’s still a win-win situation from a gardening standpoint. Homegrown, organic berries are also an accessible produce item to sell at the local farmer’s market, so making some extra cash may be another incentive for planting a berry patch in your landscape. Stretch your green thumb and try growing some of these popular berry plants.
Berry Plants Blackberry
Choose a sunny location with well-draining soil to plant blackberries. Plants come in shrubs or vines; each blackberry plant will need about two feet of growing space. Blackberry plants will produce small white blooms in the early spring, followed by immature green fruit. As the fruit grows, it will turn red and black when it is ripe. Blackberries are born on a thorny cane (much like a rose bush cane), and the fast-growing canes can be trimmed to keep each plant at the desired size.
Berry Plants Blueberry
Blueberry bushes are small and compact, making them a good berry choice to grow in small garden spaces. Blueberry bushes can even be grown in container gardens. Blueberries grow best in acidic, moist soil in a sunny location and will bloom in spring and provide ripened fruit in mid-summer. More than one bush will be needed for pollination since the plants are male and female.
One blueberry bush can produce up to 10 pounds of fruit each season, with some hybrid varieties having the ability to produce up to 25 pounds of fruit per season. Ripe blueberries are a favorite food for birds, so to keep the fowls of the air from devouring your berry crop, loosely drape netting (sold at fabric stores) over the bushes after the berries appear.
Berry Plants Raspberry
Various colors of ripe raspberries are born on long, thorny canes sprouting from plants that will produce a steady supply of berries from mid-summer until fall. Raspberry plants need plenty of space to grow and do very well when planted in full sun, with 3 feet between each plant. The flowers on these plants don’t add much to the landscape view, but the multi-colored and long-lasting berries make up for the lack of flowering beauty. Raspberries will have the most intense flavor when picked early in the morning before the sun hits the ripe fruit. Ripe berries are easily crushed, so place them in a single layer after picking them.
