Gardening

but I've not had a lot of luck establishing plants I bought commercially. The wild black raspberries took off like gangbusters, while the commercially purchased reds and goldens are struggling to even stay half-alive. If you haven't dealt with raspberries before, you'll want to do a bit of reading before you make the mistakes I made a couple of years ago. Some varieties are on a single year cycle, others a two year cycle. My blacks, for instance, run a two year cycle. During the summer, new canes will start shooting out and straight up. They're thicker, greener, have heavier leaves, and won't bear fruit that year. As fall and winter advance, they'll end up falling over to the side in long arcs. In the second year, they'll actually flower out along the length, and bear fruit that ripens up during about a two week window in july. After that fruit is harvested, those canes are done, kaput. I can cut them off down to a few inches above the soil, because they'll never fruit again, they'll just dry out and turn woody, and eventually break off on their own. But leaving them in to do that naturally makes the patch miserable to harvest from, as you're dodging all the extra thorns for no good reason.

My mistake a few years back was in not realizing that the 'non-fruit bearing' canes would bear fruit the next year, and cutting a bunch of them down while 'thinning' the patch for the first time ever. So the harvest the next year was pretty feeble, which is how I wound up reading up on the raspberry cane lifecycle, and got my harvests to come roaring back in the last couple of years.

You might even want to set up some guide wires to keep your patch from getting too wild. My black raspberries have spread enough that they're starting to grow around one of my black cherry trees, and making it tough to reach my compost heap.