Wineberries
Rubus phoenicolasius
A bramble relation whose canes root wherever their tips touch down — good fruit, but tie it in or it walks.
- Type
- Fruit · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- Red
- Sunlight
- Full sun through to light shade, with shelter if you can give it.
- Watering
- Water while it is in flower and again as the fruit swells.
- Feeding
- Feed in spring and mulch with compost each year.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- May
- Pruning
- Cut out the canes that have fruited and tie the new ones in.
- Apr–May Bud Break
- May–May Flowering
- May–Jul Fruit Set
- Jul–Aug Harvest
- Aug–Oct Growing
- Oct–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Apr Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 3 ft 3 in
- In-row spacing
- 3 ft 3 in
- Between rows
- 6 ft 7 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- A perennial crown that suckers
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 10–16 ft across, about 1.5–2.5× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 20 in of soil
The canes live two years and the root system does not. It throws new canes from roots wandering well outside the row, which is the plant working exactly as intended and a steady nuisance in a small bed. Slice them off with a spade each spring.
The habit is Wineberries’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
Garlic, Marigolds, Tansy
Green-leaved fruit, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com