Reviving Raspberries
This raspberry patch has given me a lot of grief. When we moved in over half of the patch was barely even producing. There was grass growing throughout, and most of the stalks were less than 3′ tall. In my online research I learned how to prune or plant raspberries but I didn’t find anything about this particular issue. So I thought I would share my experience so far.
We thought about taking everything out and starting with a new variety. But my grandparents always talk about how they got half of the starts from my grandma’s sister Aunt Ann. The other half they got from Bear Lake area which is famous for it’s raspberry shakes. Since the origin meant so much to them, and since we are just trying to help them, not take over…we thought it would be better to see if we could save what was there.
We (my husband and I) decided to do a section at a time to see if it would work. We started on the side that looked the worst. We figured that way we would still have something to work with if our experiment was a total failure. I don’t have any pictures of before but this is a picture of a partially replanted raspberry patch. The left side has not been replanted yet.
We started digging up the raspberry stocks. We found the the roots were pretty crowded with grass and other weed roots. So we threw out the weeds and planted the raspberry stalks back in the ground. We did some in early spring and some a few weeks later that same spring.
I did not take pictures before we started the project. We were not really sure it would work. The half we replanted earlier not only survived but grew significantly taller that summer and came back with a vengeance this spring. The half we replanted a little later did not survive the winter very well. There were only a few shoots. So, we learned that we have to replant early.
In the picture above the right bottom side is the new growth, it is doing very well. The left half is only partially transplanted. Not to mention that the irises on the far left are needing to be thinned, but that is a completely separate post. I have been really impressed at how well these raspberries have recovered. I think they were just crowded. Our plan is to keep going with the rest of the patch. I will keep you posted.
We ended up with a ton of raspberries this year. My kids really enjoyed picking them. I told them they could eat as many as they could pick…so they got pretty good at picking. : )
The ones we didn’t eat as we were picking I froze for later. Now I can have raspberries all year! I will cover more about my freezing process in another post.
