Western Morning News (Saturday)
Fruits of your labour
SUMMER RASPBERRIES MIGHT BE NEARLY FINISHED, BUT TO ENSURE A BUMPER CROP NEXT YEAR, NOW IS THE TIME TO TIDY UP AND GET PRUNING
PICKED all the berries from your summer-fruiting raspberries? It’s time to prune the plants, which means clearing away old, unproductive canes and tying in the new ones that will bear next summer’s crop.
Of course, if you grow autumnfruiting raspberries, they are just coming on stream. They will provide ripe fruit almost up to the first autumn frost – and they won’t need pruning until early next spring.
Out with the old
Take a good look along rows of summer raspberry canes so you don’t remove any of the wrong stems. You need to remove those that carried this year’s crop. You can tell which they are – the old fruited canes are usually longer, thicker, browner and woodier than new young canes.
The key identifying feature, however, is the cluster of old calyxes at the tips, showing where this year’s fruit has been picked.
Young stems are greener, shorter and thinner, with leaves all the way up the cane, and no short branching side shoots at the tip.
Cutting it
Prune out all the old stems, cutting them right back, about an inch above ground level, and remove them from the fruit garden altogether to avoid clutter or risk of disease. Old raspberry canes are too woody to compost, so put them in the council bins for garden rubbish. Alternatively, dispose of them at a council refuse site.
All in a row
Next take a look at your new canes. If they are clumped too close together, cut out the weakest to leave the tallest, strongest and thickest. Space these four to six inches apart along the row. If there are any gaps, save canes from congested clumps, and replant them into the row to make up numbers.
Fix the young canes up to the existing support system of posts and horizontal wires using soft string, so that each cane is held in position at just the right spacing.
Tie each cane in two places to hold it firm – halfway up its length, and again near the top.
If some canes are too short to reach the top wire, just tie them into a lower one, and in a month’s time, when they have reached the top wire, tie them in then. If some canes are taller than the top wire (which should usually be about five feet high), cut their tops off six inches above the top wire, after tying them in place.
Clear any weeds from around the base of the plants and from the paths between rows, sprinkle general fertiliser and, if possible, apply a mulch of well-rotted manure or garden compost to encourage good, strong growth.
A new beginning
If you have plenty of spare canes and want to start a new row, or you want to begin a new raspberry bed from scratch, prepare the soil and plant now.
It’s good practice to replace old raspberry canes after roughly 10 years as they gradually become infected with viruses that reduce cropping potential. Do it sooner if problems become evident – and always use new canes bought as virus-free stock, not home-grown canes, for this. To prepare the soil,
remove every trace of perennial weeds then dig in lots of well-rotted organic matter. Put up the supports – a series of six-foot-tall posts supporting two or three horizontal wires on which to tie your canes.
If you’re planting several rows, space them three feet apart, so there’s a good pathway between them. Also, plant a single row of raspberry canes along the foot of the support system, spacing them 18 inches apart. They will soon produce suckers to fill in the gaps.