Sunday 7 November 2010

Preparing rasberries for next year

I love raspberries - they seem pretty easy to look after and cost loads in the shops so seem to make sense to grow on the plot.  Throughout the year I have been buying various plants throughout the year costing only a pound in poundland (unsurprisingly). This is all well and good but now I discover that there are summer and autumn fruiting varieties and they need to be treated differently. Unfortunately the packets that came with the plants doesn't say which they are are.

For the moment I have put up two layers of retaining wires (well, string actually) and tied them in. If they don't fruit until late summer and fruit on old wood then I guess they are summer raspberries though the description I have found (below) doesn't make it abundantly clear.

This is particularly important as they need to be pruned at different times.
1.Summer Bearing (floricane) Raspberries will provide 1 large harvest, usually in late summer or early autumn. Summer bearing raspberries bear fruit on 2 year old canes, the canes that sprouted last season. Summer bearing raspberries can be further categorized as early season, mid-season and late season. The harvest period lasts about 4 -5 weeks.
2.Everbearing (primocane) Raspberries aren’t really everbearing, but they do generally have 2 harvests per season; one in mid-late summer and one in the autumn. The autumn crop will probably be a bit lighter and is on 1 year old canes of the current season. Many autumn bearing raspberries bear so late in the autumn that they are not practical for gardeners in short season climates.
•Prune all canes that bore fruit last year; they won’t fruit again. These will have grayish, peeling bark.
•Remove any canes that have grown outside the 12 - 18 inch designated row footprint.
•Remove any spindly or short canes.
•Thin so that there is about 4-5 of the healthiest, tallest and fattest canes left per foot along the length of the row.
•Tie remaining canes to your fencing.
•To force your everbearing raspberries to produce only one crop in the autumn, prune back the entire raspberry bush in early spring. As the canes grow back in the summer, remove outside suckers and thin the canes to about 6 inches apart. Keep the sturdiest canes. This technique will give you a larger autumn harvest and is good if you also have summer bearing raspberry bushes and you want to stagger the harvests.

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