Growing Blackberries: A Complete Profile
By Growing Home Greens Team · August 6, 2026
Blackberries have a reputation as something that grows in a hedge and tears your arms, and for wild ones that’s fair. Thornless upright varieties changed the calculation: a plant you can pick with bare hands, that stands up without a trellis, and produces more fruit than most households can eat.
They’re less cold-hardy than raspberries, hardy to about zone 5 against zone 3, which is usually what decides between the two.
The cane cycle
Same as raspberries: each cane grows one year, fruits the next, dies. Cut the fruited canes out right after harvest and tie in or head back the new ones.
There’s one extra job with erect types, and it makes a noticeable difference. When new canes reach about 3-4 feet in summer, pinch out the growing tip. That forces side branches, and the side branches are what carry next year’s fruit. Skip it and you get tall whippy canes with fruit only at the top, out of reach.
Primocane-fruiting varieties dodge all of this: cut everything to the ground in winter, get fruit on the new canes in late summer.
Where not to plant them
Not into ground that has recently grown potatoes, tomatoes, peppers or aubergines. Verticillium wilt persists in soil and will take out a young cane planting that you’d hoped to keep for a decade.
Also not somewhere you’ll want to change your mind. Blackberries root where the cane tips touch soil, which means a trailing variety left to its own devices walks steadily across the garden. It’s the same trait that makes them a nuisance in a hedgerow.
What goes wrong
Fruit only at the top of tall canes. You didn’t tip-prune. Pinch the new canes at 3-4 feet next summer.
Red, sour berries that never sweeten. Picked too early. A blackberry is ripe when it’s fully dull black and comes away with no resistance at all. A berry you have to tug is a berry that will taste sharp. This is different from raspberries, where the fruit slips off the core cleanly while still firm.
Berries dry up and go hard. Usually drought during fruiting, sometimes redberry mite in the south.
Canes die back over winter. In zone 5, an exposed site is marginal. Trailing types especially benefit from being laid down and covered.
Where to put it
Full sun, along a boundary, on the north edge of a bed so it doesn’t shade anything. In the Garden Designer it’s marked as tall and trellised for exactly that reason.
One honest warning: three blackberry plants will produce more fruit than you expect, and they are not a crop you can walk away from for a season without regretting it.
Sources: Growing blackberries in your home garden, Oregon State University Extension; Home Garden Raspberries and Blackberries, University of Georgia Extension.
Companion planting guide for Blackberry · Find your planting dates
Typically viable in USDA zones 5-9. Not sure your zone? Look it up by ZIP code.
Method: Buy as a start: Buy as a nursery start and transplant outside. Blackberry is slow or unreliable from seed, so most gardeners skip seed-starting it entirely.
See exact start-indoors, direct-sow, and harvest dates for your zone →
How many Blackberry plants fit per square foot?
Spacing: about 7 square feet per plant (square-foot-gardening spacing). Mature height: 5-8 ft.
Varieties worth considering
- Thornless erect types: Stand up on their own with minimal support and can be picked without bleeding. This is what a home garden should plant, and modern varieties have closed most of the old flavour gap with the thorny ones. (source)
- Trailing types: Long, flexible canes that must be tied to a trellis, and generally the best flavour of the three. More work, and less cold-hardy. Worth it if you have the structure and a mild winter. (source)
- Primocane-fruiting types: Fruit on first-year canes in late summer, so you can cut the whole planting down each winter and skip the cane-identification problem entirely. Newer and worth seeking out for a first blackberry. (source)
Cited from the source shown next to each variety. We haven't grown these ourselves yet, so treat this as a research-backed starting point, not a personal endorsement.
Where to buy blackberry starts
Blackberry is almost always bought as a nursery start rather than seeded. Check a local nursery or garden center; we haven't vetted online start/plant suppliers yet.
See it growing
Search YouTube for "growing blackberry" videos → (a live search, not a hand-picked video; results vary and aren't vetted by us)
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Growing Blackberry: Thornless upright varieties turned blackberries from a hedgerow nuisance into a garden crop. Which type to plant, how to prune canes, and where not to put them.
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