Training Blackberries on Wires

Left to their own devices, blackberries sprawl into a thorny tangle that's miserable to pick and prone to disease. Training them onto wires fixes all of that. The trick is simple once you see it: this year's fruiting canes go one way, next year's new canes go the other, and the two never get muddled.

This works for cultivated blackberries and hybrid berries alike — tayberries, loganberries and boysenberries are all trained the same way.

Why training matters

Blackberry canes are biennial. A cane grows one year, fruits the next, then dies — so at any moment you have two generations of cane on the plant at once. Keeping them apart is the whole game.

There are three good reasons to bother:

• Vigour. Modern UK varieties are vigorous and can throw canes 3m or more in a season. Tied in, that vigour becomes crop instead of chaos.
• Picking. Fruit held on neat, accessible canes is quick to harvest — and you're not reaching through last year's dead, thorny stems to get it.
• Airflow. An open, spread-out plant dries quickly after rain, which keeps grey mould and other fungal problems at bay in our damp climate.

If you're still deciding where to put your plants, start with the main blackberry guide — a sunny, sheltered spot with room to spread is ideal.

A post-and-wire system

You need a permanent framework before the first cane gets long. Two sturdy posts and a few horizontal wires are all it takes.

• Posts: two stout timber posts (or a wall with vine eyes), spaced 2–3m apart. Set them firmly — a mature blackberry is heavy and catches the wind.
• Wires: run 3–4 horizontal galvanised wires between the posts, the lowest at about 90cm off the ground and the rest spaced 30cm apart, up to roughly 1.8m. Tension them with straining bolts so they don't sag.
• Ties: soft garden twine or flexible plant ties. Avoid anything that will cut into the cane as it thickens.

Against a wall, fix vine eyes and run the wires through them, holding the canes about 10cm clear of the brickwork so air can move behind them.

Keeping old and new canes apart

This is the part that makes everything else easy. The goal is to always know, at a glance, which canes are fruiting now and which are growing for next year. Pick one of these three methods.

The rope (or one-way) method. The simplest. Tie all the current fruiting canes along the wires to one side of the plant, and as the new canes appear, train them all to the other side. After harvest you cut out the spent canes on the fruiting side, then swap the new canes across ready for next year. Tidy and beginner-friendly.

The fan method. Spread the fruiting canes out as a fan across the wires, fanned to the left and right, but leave the centre clear. The new canes are trained straight up through that gap and along the top wire, out of the way. After fruiting, remove the old fan and let the new canes down into a fresh fan.

The weaving method. Best for very vigorous varieties with long, whippy canes. Weave the fruiting canes in and out of the lower wires so they take up less width, and tie the new season's canes straight up the middle and along the top wire. It packs a lot of cane into a small run, though it's a bit more fiddly to unpick at pruning time.

Whichever you choose, the principle never changes: fruiting canes and new canes live on opposite sides (or in clearly separate zones), so come autumn you can cut out the dead wood without a second thought. That handover is covered step by step in pruning blackberries.

Tying in through the season

Training isn't a one-off job — new canes grow all summer and need guiding before they flop or root where they touch the ground.

Wear thick gauntlets for thorny varieties — or save yourself the scratches and grow a thornless cultivar like 'Loch Ness' or 'Oregon Thornless', both reliable in UK gardens.

A blackberry trained this way will fruit heavily for fifteen years or more, and you'll pick it standing up, in comfort. For the full growing picture — planting, feeding and varieties — head back to the blackberry guide, and for the autumn cane swap see how to prune blackberries.