Now Harvesting – Rasperries!

Following a late (but bumper!) crop of strawberries, I have three varieties of raspberries ripening.  And I think I’ll get a bumper crop of these too!

Yellow raspberry 'Anne'

Last year my raspberries were pitiful.  Tulameen, a July bearing variety, suffered root rot from the extremely wet winter (and my less than stellar drainage).  The two primocane bearing raspberries that I grow; Autumn Bliss and Anne tolerate wet feet better, but a cold spring made them late to start ripening their fruit, and then the weather turned rainy, and my berries went moldy.

Tulameen raspberries in 2010 (foreground)

This year is completely different, we still had a fairly wet winter, and a very cold spring, but my raspberries are doing better, perhaps because they are becoming well established now that they’re into the third season here.  The Tulameens are still somewhat stunted, but fruiting reasonably well (and we all agree they are the tastiest of the three), and I’m taking an early crop from both Anne and Autumn Bliss, because I didn’t remove the canes last winter as I usually do.

Tulameen raspberries 2011

As an experiment, I cut down half of the row of Autumn Bliss canes, and just removed the top portion of the other half (where they fruited last year).  Check out my Winter Blues post from last February to see what I mean.

I’ll call the experiment a success, because I’m harvesting lots of delicious raspberries now from all three varieties, and the two primocane bearers are growing vigorously and starting to flower profusely on the new canes.  I’m set for raspberries from now until hard frost (barring rainy weather).

Raspberries left - Anne and Autumn Bliss, right - Tulameen

In fact, it looks to me that the section where I kept some old canes for early fruit is a little more vigorous than the part where I cut everything down, which surprises me a bit.  Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see how actual fruit production shakes out.

Autumn Bliss raspberries - the right side is double cropped, does it look better?

I’m certainly leaning towards continuing to double crop my primocane bearers though, when it comes to raspberries, more is always better.  Next year I will also have some purple raspberries!