Bushel and Berry® Baby Cakes Blackberry

Berries are always incredibly popular with everyone. Children love them (so much healthier than candy) and fresh or baked they are supremely delicious. In the grocery store they are always so expensive, and wouldn’t it be great to just step outside your kitchen door and pick your own? It sure would be. But wait, don’t you need a big garden, and isn’t it lots of work? Well yes, it used to be, but not anymore. With the Bushel & Berry® range of compact berry bushes, you can grow them right among your flowering bushes, and even in pots on a terrace or balcony – you don’t need a garden anymore to pick your own berries. If you love the juicy sweetness of blackberries, then the Baby Cakes Blackberry was made for you. This compact and vigorous bush produced two crops of delicious berries a year – one in June and one in September, so you can enjoy bushels of blackberries in both summer and fall. Try it – you will be amazed how easy and rewarding it is.

Growing the Bushel & Berry® Baby Cakes Blackberry

Size and Appearance

The Bushel & Berry® Baby Cakes Blackberry is a thornless variety of blackberry bush, with sturdy canes that grow only 3 or perhaps 4 feet tall, making a compact rounded bush. The mid-green leaves are heart-shaped ovals, about 4 inches long, with a finely serrated edge. Look more closely and you will see that these are leaflets, arranged in groups of 3 or 5 to make the true leaf. Clusters of white flowers appear in spring and again in summer, and these quickly develop into bunches of large berries, which are first green, then red, and turn shiny black when they are ripe and ready to pick. The first crop is ready by the middle of June, and a second crop develops for the beginning of September. The berries are large and plump, with a sweet, delicious flavor with just the right amount of tartness to appeal to both adults and children. They are perfect on cereal, in a fruit salad, or baked into muffins, pies and preserves. They combine beautifully with apples in traditional desserts.

Blackberry bushes have a distinct growth cycle. New canes sprout from the base in spring, reaching their full size by mid-summer. These are called ‘primocanes’. They pass through the winter. The next year they are called ‘floricanes’, and they produce the summer crop of berries. Older varieties grew this way, with just one crop each year. The amazing Baby Cakes Blackberry produces fruit on its primocanes too, and these become your September crop.

Growing the Bushel & Berry® Baby Cakes Blackberry in Your Garden

With its compact size, the Baby Cakes Blackberry is perfect fitted among flowering shrubs in your garden, so even if you have only a small space you can enjoy them. You can grow them in a vegetable or fruit garden too. They are ideal for container growing, so place them in pots on your terrace, outside the kitchen door, or on your balcony. So convenient! So delicious!

Hardiness

In zones 7 and 8 you will always get a reliable big crop from the overwintering floricanes. In colder zones they can be damaged, and the summer crop may be limited. Don’t worry though, because you will get an extra-big September crop from the new canes, and still enjoy delicious blackberries right from your own garden. The roots are hardy all the way into zone 4, so almost everyone can enjoy growing the Baby Cakes Blackberry.

Sun Exposure and Soil Conditions

Grow the Baby Cakes Blackberry in full sun. It will grow in most well-drained soils and give the biggest crop when grown in soil enriched with organic material. For growing in pots, use a pot with a drainage hole and plant in a regular outdoor potting mixture.

Maintenance and Pruning

Use a granular complete fertilizer (e.g. 10:10:10) in March and again in early July on garden plants. Fertilize plants in containers every two or four weeks from March through September with a complete liquid fertilizer (e.g. 20:20:20). Water regularly, whenever the soil surface begins to dry, especially when growing your bushes in pots.

Prune in spring, once you see buds swelling on the overwintered canes. Remove any dead canes, and trim others back to the first buds. Even if the cane has not died back at all, remove the top few inches to encourage side-shoots and flowering. After you have picked the last of your summer crop remove those canes completely, at ground level, leaving the new primocanes to give you a September crop, and to become the flowering canes for next year’s summer crop.

History and Origin of the Bushel & Berry® Baby Cakes Blackberry

The Baby Cakes Blackberry was developed and created by Peter Boches and John Clark, expert berry breeders with Fall Creek Farm & Nursery, Inc., in Lowell, Oregon, a specialized producer of new berry varieties. They used their knowledge of plant genetics to breed several generations of hand-pollinated crosses between different blackberry varieties to develop this new bush. It was patented in 2016 with the name ‘APF-236T’. As Baby Cakes it is one of the new berry bushes in the Bushel & Berry® range, assembled by Star® Roses and Plants to bring berry growing to every garden.

Buying the Bushel & Berry® Baby Cakes Blackberry at The Tree Center

We are very excited to be able to bring you the Bushel & Berry® range, which allows you to grow a wide variety of berries right in your own garden, even if you have very limited space available. We know you will love the Baby Cakes Blackberry bush – it’s so easy and so much fun to grow. These plants are in huge demand, and we can hardly keep them on the farm. Order now, because we will be sold out before you can say, “Baby Cakes Blackberry Bush”.