Thornless Blackberries and Dying Leaves

Sometimes birds will visit your garden and plant a seed. Evtushkova Olga/Shutterstock

Q: I was cleaning up my thornless blackberry row and came across several very thorny stems. Do blackberry plants revert back to being thorny and not thornless? The rest of the plants seem to have the normal number of stems coming up from the ground. What would be the best way to get rid of them without damaging the thornless plants?

A: I suppose it is possible to have thorny stems arise from the normally thornless plant, since that is probably the opposite of how we got thornless plants in the first place.

I think it is also possible that there are thorny plants growing nearby, maybe even in a wild setting. Birds that eat the fruit from that thorny plant would then find your thornless plants producing fruit at the same time. At some point, the bird might poop out the seeds from the thorny plant while visiting your plants. The seeds then grew in your garden. Many weed shrubs come up in hedges because birds drop seeds in the hedge.

Dig gently around the thorny plant stems with a hand trowel to see if the thorny stems are attached by roots or underground stems to the thornless plants. If they are, then it is a thorny stem genetic variation. If they are separate plants, it is more likely to be a seedling plant.

Q: The tips of the leaves on several of my houseplants are dying. A couple of plants have dry, dead edges along the sides of the leaf. Any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong?

A: There are four common reasons for the dead leaf tips and leaf edges on houseplants. First, not enough water. When the plant roots can’t get enough water, the leaf tips and edges get the least amount of water because they are the farthest from the roots. This is a common problem when the plants are watered inconsistently. When the plant gets watered, the parts closest to the roots get water faster and longer than the parts farthest from the roots.

Second, hot, dry air blowing on the plant or just plain low humidity in the house can cause the leaf edges to dry out. Raising the humidity of the whole house is better for the plants and wooden furniture in the house. Adding water to trays under the plants doesn’t work all that well.

Third, too much fertilizer may have been used. Fertilizer chemicals move through the plant and accumulate at the leaf tip and edges. Eventually, there is too much of these chemical salts in the cells along the edges and they die. This may be accompanied by white salt deposits accumulating on the top of the soil and along the edge of the pot. Scoop the salt off the soil and pot and then flood the soil with clean water several times to rinse out some of the fertilizer.

Fourth, the water may have too many minerals, too much chlorine, or too much fluoride, or it may be the wrong pH for that plant. If one of these is the problem, using rainwater or water that has been sitting out for a day to allow the chlorine to evaporate can help.

Trimming the dead areas off the leaf will improve the appearance, but unless the cause is diagnosed and treated, the dead areas will come back.

Courtesy of Jeff Rugg

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