Emmet Van Driesche
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notes from the stump

cane fruits

4/11/2020

3 Comments

 
Today we planted a fifty foot row of raspberry canes. This is the time of year for thinning the herd, so if you have a neighbor or family member with a raspberry patch (we got ours from my mother-in-law), you can just ask if they have any explorers pushing out beyond the boundaries of their bed. Given half a chance, raspberries are vigorous and spread through the roots, so we planted them at the top of the orchard, where they are hemmed in at one side by the woods, and they can take over a nice swath of sunny meadow before interfering with anything. We staked a rotten log into the grass to form a bit of a terrace in the long run, dug over the uphill edge, tossed some compost from the chicken run into the holes and planted the bare root plants, watering them in with buckets from the spring.

There are two types of raspberries: early bearing ones that you prune each spring by removing the canes that bore fruit the previous season, and fall bearing ones that you cut to the ground each spring and that bear fruit on first year canes. These are the second ones, which are vigorous and tasty (believe it or not, there are many varieties of raspberries, not all of them that tasty).  We will probably get a small crop of them this year, and hopefully in two or three years we will have an abundance. This is a great example of a group of plants that you should be sourcing now from your neighborhood. Berries, comfrey, nettles, mint, all manner of spreading plants.

Go get em.

3 Comments
Dagmar Degree
4/12/2020 05:44:00 am

Hi Emmet,
Enjoy your short missives daily!
I have raspberries that fruit twice ,summer and even bigger berries in fall. I've imported them, along with a few black current canes and other plantings, from my previous home, despite the fact that I moved in January. Everything is doing well. My raspberries are not in a neat row like yours. They're always in a clump which can be tricky while picking. (I did transplant some canes to a better location last spring.)
They did bear plenty of berries the past year some of which I froze and enjoyed this winter.
Raspberries are a great plants, they don't require much after they're planted and just keep producing and multiplying.

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David Garner
4/28/2020 08:20:16 am

Have any extra canes that you'd be willing to share? I could pay for them. Thanks

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Atalanta Fugiens link
9/13/2023 02:58:07 am

Thoughtful blog thanks for sharing.

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