For years I’ve resisted growing blackberries. Somehow it seems sort of – well, cheating. Surely I should just get off my butt and forage a few? Trouble is, there aren’t that many decent brambles round South East London and what there is either gets picked bare or, tend to grow at, shall we say, ‘dog height.’

So recently I’ve been eyeing my plot neighbours’ cultivated blackberries but I’m running out of room. I’m already having to go without raspberries due to space issues.

A blackberry in a hanging basket is a curious concept – but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work and when I was offered three plants to trial, well, it would have been rude not to, really.

In theory it works really well – a basic primocane – the sort that you have to cut down to the ground every year – with extra long, extra floppy and virtually spineless. I was keen to try it.

Sadly Thompson and Morgan had a small supply failure this year and weren’t able to to get the plants out to customers until late July. I put them in hanging baskets and, in a stroke of genius on my allotment pal Paul’s part, hung them in the ’empty’ part of the strawberry cage.

They grew into tough, leafy little plants that will do brilliantly in future but, hardly surprisingly, they didn’t come to much this year. I shall cut them back overwinter, and expect great things next year. Let’s see.