Content
- Blackberries without thorns facilitate gardening and harvesting
- Thorns as a protection for plant and Fruchtbesatz
- Modern cultivars and varieties without thorns
- Use thorny blackberry varieties in a beneficial way
- Tips & Tricks
Blackberries without thorns facilitate gardening and harvesting
Wild blackberries protect their sweet fruits with a variety of protective thorns from overly greedy sweet tooth cats. Therefore, the name blackberry originally comes from the derivation of an old word for thorn bush.
Thorns as a protection for plant and Fruchtbesatz
Wild brambles have with their thorns over a proven defense mechanism for millennia. Finally, the sweet blackberries do not grow as a free end in summer on the tendrils, but serve to further propagate and spread. This can be realized on a larger scale if the seeds of the blackberry plants are picked up with the fruits of birds and released far away with the bird manure suitable as fertilizer. The thorns thus act as a reservation of fruit for the birds, as they deter and deter other animals and humans.
Modern cultivars and varieties without thorns
For commercial cultivation and gardening, brambles with thorns mean not only the need for protective clothing and gloves, but also occasional scratches and painful injuries. Therefore, in the last few decades blackberry varieties have been bred that not only produce a higher yield of larger fruits, but also have few or no thorns on the tendrils. However, early breeding trials such as the following varieties were still substandard in taste a few decades ago and not completely frost hardy:
On the other hand, these taste and climatological disadvantages could be largely compensated in newer varieties of blackberries without thorns, for example:
However, it is the Taybeere is not a blackberry in the classical sense, but a cross between blackberry and raspberry with more red fruits.
Use thorny blackberry varieties in a beneficial way
Not all gardeners today tend to use thornless blackberry species. After all, blackberries are also like a hedge used as a natural fence in which the sharp thorns protect against unwanted intruders. For this purpose, the blackberry plants are planted in the garden along the boundary of the property on a trellis of wooden pegs and tension wires, for which the variety Theodor Reimers is well suited.
Tips & Tricks
Although the proven blackberry variety Theodor Reimers is not thorn-free like thornless blackberries from modern breeds, the variety combines the advantages of large and aromatic fruits with the resistance of wild blackberry berries.