Urban Fruit Growing: Soft Fruit Edition

Wiltshire-based garden designer Dan Combes wonders why there aren’t more berries, especially in urban areas and their small gardens where a fruit tree might be too big

Over the last the weeks, I have planted thousands of bulbs: all inedible. But why (London, I’m talking to you especially) am I not being asked to plant soft fruit?
Now the bareroot season is underway, it’s the perfect time to plant some berry bushes.

Big Blackberries

Rubus fruticosus, the native blackberry-bramble, is our first love, available as it is everywhere, for everyone, often where it’s an unwanted weed.

I remember clearly when I realised as a child that my beloved juicy blackberries came from the despised thorny bramble vine in the back of the garden, where the cruel stinging nettles loomed over my head.
The stark contrast between fruit and plant was so vivid, and I had never imagined they were even connected, so it was like a magic trick.

A wild blackberry grows up to 3 metres tall and sprawls, readily layering new shoots where the canes touch the ground. It’s very tough, and is one of the few things that can fruit reasonably well in partial shade.

But for the home grower, you want a blackberry variety that suits your space, Waldo being a great, upright, relatively compact, thornless choice to squeeze in somewhere.

Getting Cross

The Rubus genus includes the raspberry (Rubus idaeus), and several unique hybrids that have higher yields, with a larger range of flavours, such as the acidic loganberry that is so good for cooking with. Many hybrids “thornless”, which often really means “very few thorns”.

Raspberries need cool, moist soil, so I don’t grow them in dry gardens, and some space with parallel support wires for most varieties, but that’s really it.

The Ribes genus (as in Ribena) of gooseberries and currants sounds closely related to Rubus, especially if you say them quickly, but they’re not.
The famous Ribes hybrid is the Jostaberry, which is so much fun to grow I would use a swear word if the kids weren’t in earshot.
It grows like an absolute rocket, and you can get two crops from it. By thinning the early fruit, which are acidic and good for cooking, you’ll get a nice crop of large, sweet fruit later to eat fresh off the branch.

And all of these plants will take a bit of shade; gooseberries do well around most deciduous trees because they leaf out before them.

Strawberries do need plenty of sun, but because they are such small plants, they need less irrigation and not much soil improvement.
They are less versatile in a design because they are effectively a ground cover plant that doesn’t like growing with bigger plants around, but they are the best berry for containers.

Training is Everything

The larger plants above, with long canes or arching stems, can be trained to grow nice and flat on wires, usually against a wall or fence.

This soothingly Texan video shows the evolution of a wire support system that starts with the minimum necessary to keep plants off the ground, and is improved in stages as the plants need more support. Real life gardening is like that.

Thus equipped, you can give your children a better blackberry bush at the bottom of the garden than what we had when we were young.

Most of the London gardens I work in have been designed for aesthetic reasons. Food production is either absent, hidden, or limited to one apple tree that mostly makes fruit for the wasps and compost or green waste bin.
Likewise, intentional wildlife sanctuaries (which are mostly made of native species) are not common.

There are many good reasons for those choices. Your garden exists to please you and your family, and that’s all.

With that being said:

Berries from the supermarket are gradually getting more ‘meh’, but the ones growing outside your door could be giving you bigger crops of fresh fruit every year!

So, given that it is common practice to “squeeze in” ornamental shrubs like roses and lanky plants like climbers, why not sneak some long cane berry bushes along boundary walls, or the small shrubs dotted around your border?

Read more about Daniel’s Garden Design Process and Service, based in Fonthill Bishop, Wiltshire.