Raspberry Planting and Care for Home Gardeners

There are many compelling reasons to grow raspberries in your garden. Store-bought fresh raspberries are often expensive and can get moldy quickly if they are not shipped and stored properly, and nothing compares to your own freshly picked raspberries. If you harvest more than you can eat, you can freeze them for later use in pies or fruit salads or turn them into delicious jams and jellies. And, even if you do not get the pruning right in the first year, the plants will almost always come back—raspberry plants are relatively tough and forgiving.

Summer-Bearing vs. Fall-Bearing Raspberries

Raspberries (Rubus spp.), a type of bramble, come in four different colors—red, black, purple, and gold—but more importantly, they come in two different bearing types: summer-bearing and fall-bearing. Fall-bearing raspberries are also sometimes referred to as "everbearing."

Summer-bearing raspberries have two types of canes. Floricanes are woody, brown canes from the previous year that bear fruit in the current year from late June to August and then die. New, green canes that grow this year are called primocanes and won't bear fruit until next year.

Fall-bearing raspberries bear fruit on this year's new, green canes, and therefore you can expect fruit the first year. The reason fall-bearing raspberries are also called "everbearing" is because they can be pruned so that they provide a small summer crop on the canes from the previous year, and a larger fall crop on this year's canes.

Because of their biology and life cycle, summer-bearing and fall-bearing raspberries have different care and pruning needs. If you plant both summer-bearing and fall- bearing types, do not interplant them. Keep the two types in separate rows or groups because if the two are mixed, it will be very difficult to identify and prune them properly.

Visit this site for an overview of recommended raspberry varieties for Pennsylvania.

Planting and Culture

Raspberries should be planted in early spring. They do best in a sunny location with sandy loam soil with a high organic matter content. Raspberries do not grow well in locations with poor drainage. You should also avoid planting in locations where tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant or strawberries were planted within the last five years, as these may harbor fungal diseases that can infect and kill your raspberries' roots.

To create the best bed for growing raspberries, prepare the soil in your selected site during the fall by adding ample amounts of compost, well-rotted manure, or peat moss, and let it "settle in" over the winter before planting the raspberries in the spring. If you are not able to prepare your bed that far in advance, your berries will still do just fine if you opt for mixing compost into the soil just before planting.

Plant raspberries in rows with the plants 2 feet apart. If you plant several rows, leave no less than 8 feet between the rows to ensure good air circulation, which will help prevent fungal diseases like anthracnose and botryti. Dig a hole or furrow large enough to fit all the roots but do not plant them too deeply: raspberries prefer to have shallow root systems, and also will not tolerate water pooling around the crown. After planting, cut the canes back to five to six inches above the ground. The soil around the roots must be keep moist for at least one week depending on weather conditions. Mulching around the plants will help maintain moisture and control weeds. We also recommend removing all flower blossoms in the first year to boost plant growth.

Most raspberries will also benefit from a trellis system, especially trailing varieties. Use steel posts about 7 feet high and 8 feet apart and buried at least one foot into the ground with two to three horizontal guide wires, work well for support. This system is a one-time investment that pays off over the years. Also, tying the brambles to the wire during the growing season with cotton twine makes picking much easier.

Fertilize the raspberries annually in early spring with a balanced 10-10-10 fertilizer (containing equal amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash). Adding well-rotted manure or mushroom soil to the soil once a year is also a good way of improving the soil quality.

Once raspberries are established, they require relatively little maintenance except for pruning and controlling their suckers. A word of caution: healthy raspberries can send vigorous suckers over several feet in all different directions. If your raspberries start suckering outside of their row, you may need to spade deeply along the row edges every few weeks during the growing season to curtail their spread below ground.

Pruning

Pruning is critical for maintaining healthy, disease-free brambles. Summer-bearing raspberries are pruned as follows: immediately after the fall harvest, the canes that just finished fruiting should be cut to the ground. The remaining new canes need to be thinned out in the spring, leaving three to four of the largest remaining canes per foot of row.

Although fall-bearing types can be pruned to yield two crops per year, you can get a more bountiful crop if you prune to encourage just a single harvest in late summer. To do this, cut all canes to the ground in the fall. In the following spring, after new canes have started growing but before the end of July, thin out the new canes to only leave three or four per foot in a row.