The Easiest Fruit to Grow




 I’ve just come back from picking the last of my Fall Gold raspberries.  Are you familiar with these melt-in-your-mouth berries? They are so much sweeter than red raspberries. They are yellow, with a blush of pink when fully ripe, and taste like pure sugar.

Long before I discovered this scrumptious variety of raspberry, Hank and I put in a large bed of a red variety called Latham.  That bed was the inspiration for submitting a column to the local newspaper and started my writing career when it was accepted.   It began this way –

“Growing raspberries is about as tricky as growing a beard. I speak from second-hand experience, I hasten to add.  Beginning a beard or a raspberry bed can be tedious, but once established, both require little pruning and much pleasure.  I assume not having to scrape one’s face every morning must be as delightful as having fresh raspberries on one’s breakfast cereal.”

Raspberries are definitely one of the most rewarding fruits to grow.  Fruit trees - apples, peaches, plums, etc. - all require spraying to produce good fruit, an expensive proposition unless you do it yourself, which is a major job.  Grapes require fancy supports and several years before the vines produce their handsome clusters of grapes.   

Before we had a raspberry bed I picked wild blackberries to make my jam, a very thorny ordeal, and a very seedy jam.  Raspberries have neither problem.  Both their thorns and their seeds are inoffensive.  The plants don’t need to be sprayed and most varieties don’t require staking. 

Raspberry plants reproduce by sending out underground stolens to make new plants.  We made our second raspberry bed by using these healthy children that pop up each year, sometimes in undesirable places.  The year I bought a dozen Fall Gold plants I made the mistake of planting them in a newly prepared bed about six feet away from the beds of reds. 

The next spring many red children invaded my planting of Fall Gold and within a few years had overpowered them, taking  firm possession of their bed.  I needed to find a new home for the gold, far away from the reds.

I tied colored yarn around the stems of the Fall Gold so I’d be able to tell them from the interlopers, and in the spring transplanted them to their new home along the south side of Hank’s shop.  It wasn’t an ideal place, a quarter mile down the hill from the house, and had limited sunlight, but it was the best I could do.

Pruning your raspberries is done in the fall.  The plants are perennials, continuing to live for years and years, but their canes are biennials. In their first year all they do is grow.  In their second year they branch, put out flowers, produce fruit, and exhausted by all that heroic effort, they die.

Each fall when the new canes are still green, the old canes look and are dead. If you don’t remove them you will end up with a briar patch even Br’er Rabbit can’t get in. Of the five or six  new canes, you should choose the best two or three and remove the rest.  The weird photo below, a back to back double view,  shows the few little piles that I removed this fall, hardly an exhausting task.

Mulching to keep down the weeds is also done in the fall.  I used to mulch our beds with left over haybales, easy to spread and full of nutrients as they decompose.  They’re also full of hay seeds, however, and after twenty years the beds were a hopeless mess of grass.  Last year I redid one bed and mulched it with wood chips, free from the town dump.  It was such a major job that I eliminated the second bed, giving away many of the plants to friends.

Some raspberries produce fruit just once a summer, usually in July, but other varieties have berries from late July until frost and are called “everbearing.”  These varieties are pruned differently since the first year’s cane produces the fruit and at the end of the season can be cut as the following spring a new cane will grow up to replace it. 

My Fall Gold are supposedly the everbearing type, but they don’t behave that way. They only start offering me ripe berries in mid-September, probably because they get so little sunlight.    Unlike most red varieties their canes grow very tall and need staking, but because “Out of sight” is “Out of mind,” I never got around to pruning or staking mine until this year when I needed a good photo for this column. 

Raspberries get moldy very quickly after a rain and need to be picked as soon as possible.  My reds did fine as they are harvested in July, but there was just too much rain this fall and so most of those sweet yellow berries got too moldy to eat. 

I recommend this variety, however.  And I’ve just gone on the Internet and read about a Fall Gold BUSH that sounds much easier to maintain.  It’s everbearing, providing fruit from June until frost.    



Quack Grass - Not for Ducks

                                       

     Believe it or not, the photo above is what my asparagus bed looked like this spring - a nightmare of very healthy quack grass. It was so thick that I couldn't find any asparagus until the stalks became inedible ferny little trees. The two raspberry beds looked equally horrible, another sea of quack grass.
     We planted both the asparagus and the raspberries in 1982 and for almost 30 years we mulched them with hay bales each fall. In early spring when I harvested the asparagus, I would pull the few bits of quack grass which appeared. This year the sight of all that wretched grass filling the beds was as upsetting as discovering a dozen snakes in the compost pile. How was I going to get rid of that grass without killing my lovely asparagus and raspberry bushes?
     I like to think of myself as an organic gardener, and do not like using chemicals, but I"m no purist and am willing to make exceptions when there's no alternative. Nowadays there are dozens of chemical products on the market to help gardeners solve vegetation problems, many of them selective, which means they only kill specific types of vegetation.
     Since we have a major problem with multiflora roses in our pastures, we use Crossbow, which kills these thorny monsters without harming the grass beneath them. Grass-be-Gone is another selective chemical, which obviously kills grass, but does not harm broad-leaved vegetation. GroundClear is a chemical used on driveways or similar areas that kills everything in sight and out of sight, as it poisons the soil and all vegetation for up to a year. Round-up is a systemic that is applied to undersirable vegetation. It travels down from the sprayed plant and kills the root but does not poison the soil.
     Quack grass, like a dozen other types of vegetation, clearly adored the combination of warmth and rain that spurred their growth these last two years. Being totally ignorant of how to solve the problem, I took the photo of my aspargus bed and went to see Crop Production Services in Amenia, NY. , the outfit that sells us Crossbow. They were extremely helpful, giving me explicit directions on how to treat the asparagus bed.
     "In the fall when the aspargus has finished growing, mow down the bed. When the new quack grass appears, spray the entire bed with Round-up, the systemic poison that kills whatever vegetation it covers by traveling down to the roots, but does not harm the soil. Just make sure all the asparagus is gone."
     And the raspberry beds? I actually was so concerned about the asparagus, I forgot to ask, but as the summer progressed the quack grass in the raspberries began to look very thick and healthy, and the raspberries started looking sick.
     Raspberries are biennials. Their first year they just come up. The second year they bloom, have berries and die. These dead stalks should be removed and only two or three new young stalks should be left on each plant. Since I couldn't do anything about the asparagus until late Stepember at the earliest, I decided to tackle the first raspberry bed at the end of August. I uprooted huge hunks of quack grass and old hay and cut down the summer's dead raspberry canes, filling the pick-up truck to overflowering 3 times.
     It was an exhausting job and I wasn't done. Within a week green blades of quack grass began to appear. I sprayed them with Round-up, carefully protecting the raspberries. I did this once a week. Then my wonderful yard man, Steve, brought a truckload of wood chips from the town dump and spread them on the bed.

                                      

     By the time we were done I just couldn't face the second bed. Why did I need two beds anyway? Steve took the cycle bar mower and cut down all the raspberries in the second bed. Then I took a trowel and dug up all their roots. Then I weeded, raked, seeded the bed with nice grass seed, watered and took a picture! There's no sign of new grass yet, but I plan to save the rest of this story for sometime next spring, including the success or failure of the asparagus bed.