We bought our boysenberry plant from a local grower that regularly attends our Saturday morning farmers market back in 2018. I wasn’t convinced that any kind of berries would grow well here in our awful clay soil and hot dry summers. I’ll say it though… I was wrong.
I planted our new boysenberry baby at the base of our big pine armed with only the knowledge that berries prefer acidic soil and pine trees make the soil around them more acidic and that the pine would give it some much-needed afternoon shade. Through 2019 it put on plenty of new growth and I quickly became optimistic. It had so much new growth that it had grown all the way around the tree (to the sunny side), dove into the ground and rooted itself! It survived multiple frosts unscathed and in spring of 2020 it gave us handfuls of plump, sweet and tangy berries for months on end. Then we broke heat record after heat record through 2020, did they die? Nope! They are stronger than every spring we look forward to bowls & bowls of delicious berries.
Now that the boysenberry is well established and sending out shoots that are beginning to root themselves in the ground I’ve decided it’s time to get control of its growth before it takes over! I’m going to talk you through how I create new plants from my established boysenberry plant utilizing runners that the plant is already trying to root in the ground.
- Fill a 1-gallon pot with quality potting soil and a few handfuls of compost or worm castings.
- Take one of the shoots that has begun to root itself and bury it in the center of the pot.
- Keep moist until roots have taken hold.
- Cut the rooting off of the main stem with at least 3-5 leaf nodes on your cutting. Getting the roots to a good point takes about 2-4 weeks for me.
- You can also remove a new cane & using rooting hormone pot them up but that is a whole different technique for another day.
That’s it, now you have rooted cuttings to replant, share or sell!
