Sigh, black raspberry season is over for another year.
Not a bad haul this year, I'd certainly have to give it 'bumper crop' status. Barring the 4 or 5 cups we kept out and made a couple of kuchen with, I pulled in and froze 82 cups, which is enough for 10 batches of jam, which will wind up being somewhere around 90 or so 8 oz jars. Now I need to get in there and cut back all of the canes that fruited this year to give space for the new canes to strengthen for next year. I'm thinking I should also lay down pavers along the fence where I've got the sort of alley I use to walk around that side of the patch. Getting tired of walking through mud there, since grass doesn't grow in the constant shade.
Garlic will be the next harvestable crop. My red inchelium had a really tough winter, and I ended up losing about half the crop, but what's left has been coming along nicely. I'm guessing I'll be pulling it up in a month, maybe a month and a half at latest, depending on the weather.
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And supposedly, a lot of raspberry growers around here got skunked by the nasty winter, with poor yields. But my raspberries are actually patches started from wild berries I picked out in the woods, so have more vigour than the cultivated varietals.
Apart from the genetic differences, blackberry fruit is shaped more like mulberries or rugby balls, while black raspberries have that classic dome shape with the hollow core you see on red raspberries.
Here's a link to a site that goes into more depth, although the takeaway is that black raspberries aren't as sweet, but are far healthier for you than blackberries 