Raspberries: A Great Choice for Time-Crunched Gardeners

Think you’re too busy to grow your own fruit? Think again. Raspberries are one of the more forgiving fruits to grow at home. My own neglected plants have proven these tough little fruits can survive despite our busy lives.

The day we planted raspberries at our house, I’m sure the neighbors thought we were nuts. Not because they had something against growing raspberries, but rather the whole scene they were witnessing.

It was early spring, and we had barely been in our house for a year. This was long before we had kids, and we were focused on our landscape. We had bought our house new the year prior, complete with absolutely nothing in the yard.

With both of us working full-time (and then some) there wasn’t a lot of extra time for gardening. You would find one or both of us in the yard every weekday evening, and both of us on the weekend.

It was not uncommon for either one of us to want to finish “one more thing”, so on multiple occasions we would be trying to finish up after dark. Planting the raspberries were one of the more ridiculous after dark escapades. There was a rototiller involved. I don’t suggest any of you try to operate a rototiller in the dark, even if your spouse is holding a flashlight on where you’re trying to till.

Somehow, we managed to get our raspberries planted without injury, and we provided an evening’s entertainment for our new neighbors.

But rest assured, if you want to plant raspberries in your own yard this year, you don’t need to make it as difficult as we did.

If you look at all the different homegrown fruits possible in our Zone 5/6 climate, raspberries require a lot less attention and can be easy maintenance.

Most red raspberries as we know them were developed from crossing two species—Rubus ideaus, native to Europe and Rubus strigosus, native to North America. Black raspberries are the species Rubus occidentalis. Purple raspberries are crosses or hybrids of red and black raspberries.

Yellow, golden or orange raspberries are typically mutants of red-fruited varieties, although there are a few yellow-fruited mutants of black raspberries. Cornell University released a coral pink cultivar called ‘Double Gold’ in 2012.

But before you get too invested in choosing which color raspberry to grow, you’ll save yourself some maintenance time by learning about how raspberries grow and produce fruit.

I’ve watched helplessly as entire audiences’ eyes glazed over while speakers explained this, but trust me it’s a necessary (but tedious) topic.

Raspberries are a perennial crop, but the shoots, or canes that grow are individually biennial. That means that each individual cane will only live for two years.

Keep this in mind.

During its first year of growth, a cane is called a “primocane”. In some raspberry cultivars, the primocanes do not produce flowers and fruit. In its second year of growth, the cane is called a “floricane” and it produces flowers followed by fruits.

If you just let raspberries grow without pruning or cutting back, there would be a mixture of primocanes and floricanes present at any given time.

There are raspberry cultivars available that are called primocane fruiting or autumn fruiting types. These cultivars flower and set fruit on the primocanes. They will set fruit on floricanes too, but usually this second crop is of lesser quality— meaning fewer, smaller fruits.

All raspberries will need to be pruned or cut back at some point. But the best plan of attack depends on whether you have primocane (autumn) fruiting or floricane fruiting raspberries. For both types of fruiting, you can choose to just remove the dead canes each year, leaving both primocanes and floricanes intact. Remember that floricane fruiting cultivars must be pruned this way if you want to harvest any fruit—they only produce fruit on the floricanes, so if you remove the floricanes you won’t harvest any fruit!

After we planted our raspberries, I expected to fuss around pruning individual canes each year. That’s what I remember having to do back home in my family’s garden.

But then I learned that you can cut Autumn or primocane fruiting cultivars completely down to the ground after last harvest in the fall.

My ears perked up, because cutting all the canes down in the fall is A LOT less work than considering each individual cane each spring. It turns out this is the preferred way to grow these cultivars. Cutting down every cane in the fall channels all the plant’s energy into producing primocanes the following spring, which for these types yield the best quality fruit. It also reduces the chances of diseases overwintering in plant debris.

Once you’ve chosen a raspberry cultivar (preferably primocane fruiting) it’s time to plant, right?

Some sources recommend you spend the first year just preparing the soil for planting the second year! Raspberries produce best in soils with high organic matter, which may take some time to build up depending on your existing soil. Compost, aged manure and shredded leaves are great sources of organic matter.

As with many plants, raspberries need well-drained soil. They will tolerate a pH of about 5.8-6.5, and prefer a sunny location. Give them adequate water, about an inch or two per week for healthy growth, but they do not like wet feet. Raspberries are shallow rooted and so it’s a good idea to use mulch around the base of the plants to prevent the roots from drying out.

Although your neighbor may have a ton of raspberry plants they want to share, the “best” recommendation is to buy plants that are certified disease- free from a reputable nursery of mail-order company. But I’ve been known to ignore my own advice.

My practical suggestion as a person that can rarely pass up free plants is to use some common sense.

When you are offered raspberries divided from someone’s garden, take a pass if they look less than happy, green and healthy. If you are a real plant addict and take some sick looking raspberries home despite your better judgement, at least isolate them 75-100 feet away from any other raspberries you may have, in an attempt to contain any diseases they may harbor.

Because they can be susceptible to verticillium wilt, a fungal disease, the best sites for raspberries should not have had verticillium-prone crops eggplant, potato, tomato or strawberry planted there for the last five years. There are other fungal and viral diseases, as well as insect pests that target raspberry.

Black raspberries in particular are susceptible to viral diseases spread by aphids among raspberry plants. Plant black raspberries at least 75-100 feet away from other raspberries as an attempt to keep these viral diseases away.

A relatively new insect pest is spotted wing drosophila, a fruit fly from Asia that particularly loves blackberries, blueberries and raspberries. They lay their eggs on the ripening fruits, the eggs hatch and larvae eat the fruit. Keeping ripe fruit picked is the primary way to keep these fruit flies at bay. That’s never a problem at our house. I don’t think any raspberries have made it into the house since my son was old enough to eat them!

I don’t do this on our plants, but using fine netting or floating row cover on raspberries can help exclude the tiny flies. University of Minnesota published a helpful article on spotted wing drosophila in home gardens which includes multiple control measures you may want to try if you notice these insects in your raspberries. I know we have them in central Illinois– I’ve seen them myself on a friend’s blackberries a mile down the road. But I’ve never noticed anything crawling out of our blackberries or raspberries. Even if they are there and I’m just oblivious, the Minnesota article points out there is no risk associated with eating this fly larvae. But I’m grossed out just thinking about it!

Raspberries can be grown as individual plants, sometimes called hills, or in wide rows called hedgerows. Either way you grow them, they can be pushy little plants in the garden. Raspberries produce tons of suckers—which is why friends that grow raspberries always want to share extra plants with you! Thankfully, raspberry root systems are shallow, so they are easy to remove. In my garden, any suckers outside the designated “raspberry area” get removed.

Trellising your raspberries will make harvesting fruits a lot easier. Without trellises, the canes tend to flop on the ground, and it’s easy to miss entire canes full of fruit when harvesting. Plus if the fruits touch the ground they tend to rot quickly. My husband built simple “T” trellises for our raspberries, using metal fence posts and scrap lumber. We have our “T” trellises about every five feet down the length of our raspberries.  He drilled a series of holes in the wooden cross-piece of the “T” and this is where I threaded twine through to hold the canes off the ground. It’s not fancy, but it works great.

If you’re tight on space and have no “in ground” space for raspberries, there are varieties that grow well in a large pot. I had some success with Raspberry Shortcake® raspberries bred for container growing. The first year I had them the plants were covered in fruits.

They probably would have done better if I hadn’t mindlessly cut all the canes back in the fall of the first year I had them. Of course I realized after I had already cut them back that unlike our other raspberries planted in the ground in our yard, Raspberry Shortcake® only fruits on floricanes.

Needless to say very colorful words streamed from my mouth at that moment. Remember all that stuff about primocanes and floricanes and how everyone just about dies of boredom learning about it?  This is why it’s important. So you don’t ruin an entire year of your raspberry crop.

Yes, by cutting everything back that first year, I removed all the canes that would have been floricanes and produced fruit the following year.

The second year I had a nice green plant made up of all primocanes for my patio. Not a single fruit. 

The third year I  had just given birth to my daughter– and my gardening efforts were sporadic at best. My plant died. Raspberry plants are tough, but they couldn’t handle being nearly totally neglected. Even plants have their limits!

I’d like to say I thoroughly researched what raspberries I planted in my garden by the light of a flashlight years ago. But I’d be lying if I did. I bought a spring special from a mail order company for the red-fruited ‘Caroline’ and yellow-fruited ‘Anne’. I was relieved to discover they are both primocane, or autumn fruiting types—so yes, I can and do cut them all down to the ground each fall.

My raspberries proved to me that good site selection and cultural practices will go a long way in keeping raspberries healthy.  They enjoyed annual fertilizing and mulching before my son came along. For the last four years the most that’s happened is cutting down the canes in the fall. Last year that didn’t even happen! (But it did give me the opportunity to take some pictures of neglected raspberries to include with this post!)

With the exception of my ill-fated potted raspberry plant my plants have produced berries each year in spite of everything I didn’t do. I did notice last year that their growth and berry production seemed to be trailing off a bit. I’ve resolved to at least give them a dose of fertilizer this spring.

If you’ve always thought you were too busy to grow fruit at home, consider putting in a few raspberry plants this year. No planting by flashlight under cover of darkness required!

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