How To Grow Your Own Raspberries

On this episode of AgriCultured, Farm Director Pam Jahnke talks with Ed Bures from Bures Berry Patch about Raspberries and the best ways to grow them at your own home.

Challenges with Growing Raspberries

Raspberries require a lot of attention, just like many other fruits and vegetables. In much of the Midwest, raspberries commonly face issues with root diseases. If you are planning on planting a raspberry patch, there are a couple things you want to consider.

Planting your raspberries in raised beds and using metered watering with a dripline is important so you don’t let the foliage of the plants get too wet. When raspberries are fruiting, they are susceptible to fruit rots, which can be caused by the fruit becoming too wet.

Raspberries are very susceptible to root rot, fruit rot, and leaf diseases. A lot of the plants bred today resist leaf diseases, but the environment can still bring in some of these viral or bacterial diseases.

One big thing you can do to handle these issues chemically, is to keep your raspberries in rows that are trellised to keep the stems upright so they are up off the ground. This also allows the wind to blow around in them and dry the fruits off.

You can also keep the beds raised, so if you get too much rain, the water will run off of the plants so it doesn’t sit and rot the roots away. Metering and minimizing water is important for raspberry plants, both on the fruit foliage and the roots.

Selecting Your Raspberry Stock

First, you need to decide when you want to pick your raspberries. Everbearing Raspberry plants typically produce a crop both mid-summer, in July, and a second crop in the fall, around September and October.

Bures Berry Patch cuts their raspberry canes down to the ground in the fall to eliminate the summer crop the following year, so that all the new growth coming up the next spring will produce a very fine, excellent crop yield in the fall.

But, if you overwinter the canes of Everbearing raspberries and trim the canes at about shoulder height, you will get a summer and fall crop the following year.

Everbearing raspberries are recommended for home growers so you can have canes that will produce both a summer and fall harvest.

When to Prune the Canes

Typically when a raspberry cane is expired or dying, they turn brown and lose all their leaves. It is sometimes easy to confuse expired canes with canes that are dying back in the fall.

Healthy canes will remain a darker red or purple color, whereas dead canes will turn brown. Those dead canes should be cut out because they may cause competition with healthy canes and create residues that may cause diseases within the patch.

Types of Raspberries

There are four different raspberry varieties. Yellow, or Golden Raspberries, and Red Raspberries, which are grown for commercial production.

Black Raspberries typically grow in the wild and are not usually grown for commercial production. They are in competition, so they are not as productive.

There’s also Purple Raspberries, which are starting to become more popular in commercial growing.

How Long Do Patches Last?

Raspberry patches can last about 10 reproductive years, as long as you keep them fertilized and keep weeds and diseases out. Some large patches can even last well over ten years when properly cared for.

In a garden, as long as you keep the old canes pruned out and keep new plants healthy, raspberry plants could potentially last forever.

For more tips on growing your own produce, check out more of Blain’s Farm & Fleets hobby farming and gardening blogs.