Wrangling raspberries

Monty was tidying his raspberry canes on this week's Gardeners World. Timely, I thought, I've been avoiding doing that job for at least 3 weeks...

Out with the old, in with the new

This year's berries are long gone, as we're usually picking around Wimbledon time, & those fruiting stems are properly dying back now. By contrast, this year's new stems are tall, vigorous & bright bright green. Deffo time to sort them out.

Despite their prickly exterior, raspberry plants are surprising brittle - they snap as soon as you look at them & they don't repair themselves. To survive the blusters of Winter & make it through safely to provide lots of fruit next year, they need our support now.

But 1st things 1st: the old brown stems won't fruit again next year so they are all snipped out at the base. So I don't damage the new stems, I remove these offcuts very carefully, often snipping along the length of the old stem & removing in shorter sections - it's a bit safer.

A bit of structure

Cos they're tall & our garden is small, the raspberries are planted against a wall. This is great for a few reasons:

• All the fruit is easy to reach by only trampling on 1 set of under-planting.
• My flimsy bamboo supports can be tied to something much more sturdy.

It's worked so far, but I do rebuild it every year, & have only needed to do the occasional mid-Winter repair after a particularly stormy night.

So last years bamboo comes down - dangerous time as the new stems are well over 6 foot tall & catch the lightest breeze. Thankfully it was a calm day... unlike today which is bloody blustery & from here on the sofa I can see the rasps getting blown all over the shop. Fingers xed it all holds...

New uprights in 1st, then 3 rows - bottom, middle, top, in front of the rasps, so I've trapped the stems between the frame & the wall.

A bit of bondage

Normally I don't bother to tie the stems in any further than that - the wall/frame sandwich being sufficient. Monty was a bit more forceful & recommended tying each stem into the support, to stop them flapping about. To be fair, I have noticed a fair bit of stem damage where their spines have been rubbing up against each other, so hopefully this'll stop that.

A little off the top?

Something else mentioned on Gardeners World: chopping the very tops of the tallest stems. Normally that's exactly what I'd do too (woohoo! go me!). But earlier this year on a trip to Alnwick Garden, I spotted a different approach.

As you can hopefully see in the pic, the Alnwick Gardeners loop over the long raspberry stems & tie them back into the frame. Genius. Extra fruit! My guess this is done now, when the stems are green, cos they will bend a bit if you're careful. So I've tied in the tops of all the stems that are long enough. Some aren't quite there yet, so I'll do those a little later. I'm a bit worried they're a bit skinny tho...

All done

A mulch of homemade compost around their feet & that's the rasps done for another year. Hurrah!