Fruit - Raspberry

Raspberries grow on canes, or plants, and you need several plants to get a good crop of raspberries. The plants are perennials, and die down each year, with new shoots growing at the base of the plant during the summer, so they need pruning, or rather, tidying up, once a year.

Otherwise they need little work, except weeding, picking the fruit, and persuading the plants to stay in the raspberry bed, and not migrate into the rest of the garden. A raspberry root sends out roots sideways, which grow into new plants, and it does this a lot. You can dig up these new plants and use them to fill in any gaps in the raspberry bed, or give them away to other people, or, quite frankly, throw them away.

The pruning involves cutting out the old canes close to the ground, then tying up the new canes you do want to a support, as raspberry canes are quite floppy, and fall over. The old canes (this year's fruiting canes) and the new canes (next year's fruit) are there at the same time. If you remove the new canes by mistake, you loose new year's crop, so be careful. But it's easy to tell the difference. If you leave this process until te old canes have died back, in the autumn, they will be brittle and easy to break. Also they have side branches, while the new canes tend to be single stems without side branches. The stem colour is different as well, and once you start pruning them, you will probably notice this. Cut out the old shoots and remove them. They are useful, in fact, as supports for peas, or to start bonfires.

There may be too many new canes. You only want about 2 or 3 per root, so remove any surplus, like the old canes. The rest need to be tied up. We have made a support for our raspberries. The canes grow in two lines, with enough space between to walk through, and we remove any that grow elsewhere. There is a stake each end of the row, originally bamboos, but they kept blowing over, so we invested in something more substantial. The stakes are about 5 foot high. Wires are strung between the stakes. The new canes are tied to this. The old canes were tied in the same way last year, so we have to remove the ties before removing the canes. The final task is to cut off the tops of the new canes if thhey are too tall. Some of our canes grow way over 6 feet tall, and we're not going to support them at that height, or be able to pick the fruit if we did. So I cut new canes back to about head height, if they've grown above that. Once this whole job is finished, you have two walls of canes, tied to the wires, which support each other during the winter storms.

We don't net our raspberries. Possibly birds eat some, but there are more than enough for them, and us.

When picking raspberries, lift up leaves, as raspberries like to hide underneath. You pick the raspberries once red, when they pull off easily from the white cone which are their centres. Once the raspberries are picked, we turn them out onto paper towel for a bit before using. Usually, at some point in the year, little white weevils take up residence in the raspberries, and leaving them in this way gives them an opportunity to crawl out.

We love raspberries. And a good year provides not only lots for us, but also we can give them away to friends. Raspberries freeze well, and you can make jam, so gluts can be dealt with satisfactorily. We eat raspberries, raw, with ice cream. There is also summer pudding, plus raspberry jam. A recent discovery - you can buy merangue nests, or just merangue bits, from supermarkets, plus some kind of thick cream, and then construct a Pavlova (a well-known dessert), by combining them with raspberries.

My recipe for raspberries:

Summer pudding
Raspberry jam

Buds