Hey, my name is Connie
and today I'll show you how I grow all these berries
in pots here in my garden in Melbourne.
So if you wanted to grow one berry,
I highly recommend strawberries because they are
really small plants,
as far as fruiting plants go.
They’re really compact
and you can grow them in balconies,
you can grow them on hanging planters or just pots in general.
Over here I have maybe 30 plants,
but one strawberry plant’s only that big.
So it makes it really easy if you have a small space.
If you want to grow strawberry plants
it's best to grow them from runners.
So this is a runner.
Strawberry plants, they send out these mini baby plants
and they’re like a clone, an exact clone of the mother plant.
And if you plant the runner, you can get fruit a lot sooner
than if you plan it by seed.
So one thing you definitely have to do
if you have strawberry plants is to mulch them,
because otherwise the berries, if they sit on the soil,
they will more likely rot
if they’re kind of touching moisture.
In order to kind of combat that
I decided to give growing strawberries in pots a go.
Because if you grow them in pots,
you can grow them on the edge of the pot
and then they overhang.
That way they don't rot from the moisture of touching the soil.
So strawberry plants, they
fruit in summer as most of the berries do
and then around maybe autumn they start to die back.
You can give them a little bit of a haircut
because depending on where you live
the leaves kind of go all gross.
So I cut them back a bit in winter and they stay dormant
and then they will sprout a heap of new leaves again come spring
and then you will get fruit from
maybe like late spring to early autumn.
So over here I have a different kind of strawberry.
These are called white alpine strawberries.
So they're like, well, they're strawberries, but they're mini.
So these ones, they’re white, which kind of makes it a little bit confusing
to figure out whether they’re ripe or not.
So in order to tell whether or not they're ripe
you just touch it and if it’s soft then it's ripe
and if it comes off easily, then it's ripe
because they're like a little bit squishy
they don't last very long
once you pick them.
So I actually — this is like my snacking bed in the garden.
So if I'm hungry, I just come around here
and I look for, I dig for strawberries to eat.
I feel like you can never have enough blueberry plants.
I have 10.
Most people, when they grow blueberries,
they always make the mistake of using premium potting mix
or just regular potting mix, which is neutral in pH.
But blueberries, they really, really need acidic soil.
So acidic potting mix is azalea and gardenia mix.
So that would be acidic in pH.
And then in order to keep it acidic,
a really good thing to do that I recommend
is to grow them in pots like I've got here.
So go with a really big pot.
I think this one is about 50 centimetres wide
and then just fill it up with acidic potting mix
and you can mulch on top with
pine bark mulch, which is acidic in nature as well.
So that is a really important tip for growing blueberries.
So the next thing I wanted to show you,
were my brambleberries
So I first started off with three plants,
a youngberry, lawtonberry and a loganberry.
So this one over here, this one is a boysenberry.
I had only seen people grow them in the ground.
And I have a regular suburban backyard.
And I didn't want to put them in the ground
because I didn't have enough space.
When you do put them in the ground,
they kind of send out shoots underground
and they pop up everywhere in your garden
so they can get a bit weedy.
So the way these berries grow
is that they grow on these canes
and they're really long, so they grow
almost like a vine and they could grow three or four meters long.
So I also had to figure out how to contain them.
So I picked up this trellis thing.
It's like a vertical trellis and you just shove it in the pot.
And then what I've done is
I've kind of woven the canes around
and then I've tied it up with string.
And so far it's doing pretty well for me.
So I was really excited about that.
So this one over here is a loganberry.
So this is one of the few varieties that you can get thornless.
So if you want to try one that won't injure you as much,
you can try a loganberry.
I recommend planting them in a morning sun spot
because they sometimes get sunburnt.
So you can see this berry here’s kind of sunburnt.
This one here, I believe, is a tayberry
but it could also be a boysenberry because it looks so similar
So the reason why I have so many different varieties
is because they all ripen at different times
so I can get a longer harvest
from all my berry plants.
To me, they taste a little bit similar, all of them,
but I'm sure somebody else will tell you that
they taste a bit different to each other.
So this is my raspberry wall.
I call this place my raspberry avenue
because it's a whole wall of raspberry plants.
So I have three different varieties here.
I have a raspberry ‘Tulameen’, it is a thornless variety,
which is really awesome because you don't want to get pricked
if you don't have to.
Next to it I have a purple raspberry plant.
So that one ripens a little later than the red raspberry,
which means I can get a longer harvest overall.
This one over here is my golden one.
So this is a golden raspberry.
It's probably my favourite raspberry plant
because they taste,
I think they taste a little bit different to regular raspberries.
They're really sweet and they kind of taste tropical.
You definitely should net your berries if you can.
I just realised a few days ago that this plant looks like
something may have found it
because there's a lot of broken branches over here.
The saying goes, “No net, no fruit”,
so I highly recommend you net them.
With all the berries that grow on canes
they come in two different types.
If it's the first-year fruiting one, you cut all of the canes down
once it has fruited and you’ll grow new ones the next year.
And if it's like a second-year-fruiting one,
which this one is, you'll see
there's fruiting canes and there's non-fruiting canes.
And basically every year you just cut the fruiting canes off
and then tie the non-fruiting ones on.
So these are my currant plants.
So this over here is a redcurrant
and that one is a white currant.
So this is the first year I'm growing currants,
so they're pretty new to me.
But you can also grow these in pots.
So I have, I think, it's about a 40 centimetre pot here.
With currants you can grow them in shade.
So it's really good if you have a shady spot
and you don't know whether or not the plant will grow.
So apparently white currants and redcurrants
are sweeter than blackcurrants, which is why I'm growing them.
I don’t have a blackcurrants plant, yet.
But yes, I'm really excited for this harvest
because it's my first time growing them
and also I haven't tasted them yet.
So I hope you enjoyed this video and
that this inspires you to give growing berries a go, as well, at home.
And if I can do it, you can do it too.