Late summer's most refreshing reward is raspberries.
Plump, ripe berries fall easily into your hand with the
slightest pressure. When you grow your own, you can pop some of the
sun-warmed berries into your mouth as you pick.
One of the easiest fruits you can grow, fall-bearing raspberries
continue to ripen over a period of many weeks, often lasting right
up to the first fall frost.
Other fruits have plenty of problems. Apples, for example, get
worms and scab. Grapes suffer from downy mildew. Cherries and
peaches are often attacked by brown rot. Strawberries may succumb
to gray mold. But year after year, my Heritage raspberries produce
a near-perfect, problem-free crop.
When it comes to pruning the plants and fending off diseases,
fall-bearing raspberries such as Heritage have several advantages
over summer-bearing raspberries like Latham. With the fall-bearers,
you can just mow off all the canes at ground level anytime in
winter or early spring.
Not only is this less tedious than the selective pruning
required for summer bearers, it also insures that no canes infected
with disease remain to infect new shoots. There's no worry about
damage from cold temperatures or browsing rabbits and deer, either,
since you aren't aiming to save anything above ground anyway.
It doesn't take a lot of raspberry bushes to produce your fill
of raspberries.
Ten plants spaced 3 feet apart will quickly fill in to make a
dense hedge that will supply bucketsful of fruit.
Choose a sunny spot with well-drained soil for raspberries. You
can plant container-grown raspberries anytime, but if you're
willing to wait until spring to plant bare-root plants, it will
cost less to buy the plants.
When I discovered the ease of growing fall-bearing raspberries,
I got rid of my summer-bearing Latham raspberries.
