A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum Fruit Forum raspberries gone wild

Hello. I bought my house a few years ago and saw that I had a few raspbrry plants in an overgrown vegetable garden. Basically, they were the only food-plants left in the thing. The next year I pulled out all the crud from the garden and discovered that there were now enough plants that I made jam. Last year, I didn't get hardly any berries as the weather was VERY cold and wet so the plants berried later than I was looking. Now there are TONS of plants in the garden. I'm going to have a HUGE crop of berries if the weather holds.

But there is NO order to the plants. It's a 10x20 foot swatch of raspberry plants and crab grass and other weeds. I've read online that raspberries should be put on trellises 8 feet apart, but if I do that I won't have but the 2 rows. Obviously, I'll start working on this after they finish producing, but any ideas on how to start orgainizing the plants without losing too many? I have MANY friends who were VERY upset that there was no jam last year....

Thanks.

Try ammending the soil a bit, make sure you weed everything, maybe trim the plants down a bit after the produce and start dying down again, or maybe just get a few new plants, or even transplant the smaller ones into where you want them...
otherwise, I would just let them be, maybe they had a bad year?

--Mark--

I just leave my raspberry canes grow wild in a patch and mow over the ones that go beyond where I want them.

Unless i am remembering wrong, aren't rasperries like blackberries?/ if so at the end of the bearing season you want to trim off the canes that bore.

then in the spring trim back each side "arm" (can't think of the proper name) to about 12-18 inches.--(they will grow well beyond this length as the year progresses, so don't worry that you are cutting them too short) as they grow you can 'train" them up to a trellis. i always thinned out mine-but i am sure I lost lots of berries with doing that---but the ones I got were bigger---so i did not worry.

also they tolded us that IF the main cane was more than pencil in size they would not do any good---I found that not to be the case--but whenever I wanted to thin out a cane or 2 I chose the thicker main canes. -----they did seem to snap right out of the ground---

i say Raspberries are like blackberries because the home extension berry class i went to to learn how to trim Blackberries actually used raspberries in their demonstration

what Mark said about the weeding & such is true---I always weeded & heavily mulched my plants. (i used grass clippings) Adequate water is needed to ensure a good harvest.

blackberries here grow on vines, nasty thorny briar vines... but they taste good

same here too--but I was referring to the tame blackberries that you get from a mail order place like say Starks.

I will say that the wild berries have a much better flavor than the tame do, for sure!!