RASPBERRIES

The BEST damn fruit you can grow!

I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm going to grow anything with thorns in my garden, I'd darn well better be able to get something to eat out of the deal. Sure, roses look and smell great (if you don't get a hybrid that has no scent), but come winter you've got nothing to show for it and with the Fargo/Moorhead winters the roses will probably die from the cold. With Raspberries you can open your freezer and pull out a bucket of the frozen little wonder snacks. If you're stuck home during one of those wonderful mid January or February blizzards you can bake up a home made berry pie that will leave you feeling better than if you'd just got done making a blizzard baby. Well, that may be pushing it, but it's darn close.

Raspberries are one of the easiest to grow fruits I've dealt with. They also do quite well in our high pH soil. You have MANY different kinds to choose from. I've decided that Raspberries are so good that I've dedicated most of my back yard to growing them. I've got the black variety (also known as blackcaps) "Bristol" that produce an extremely heavy crop of shiny berries early in the summer. I've found that these blackcaps produce earlier and heavier than all of my other types. The blackcaps are more seedy than others but I can put up with a few seeds.

My next producing variety is the old standby "Latham" reds. These are what most people think of as normal raspberries. They produce an abundant crop in mid July. They are very flavorful and quite winter hardy. I've had a few problems with cane borers and fungal situations, but with proper maintenance procedures I've gotten things under control.

Shortly after the reds, my purple "Royalty Purple" berries begin ripening. These berries are a cross between a red and black raspberry. These berries have a more mild and tart flavor but the berries are HUGE! These berries get to the size of moderate strawberries. It doesn't take too many of these suckers to fill a bowl.

After the summer has left us and our gardens wanting for more of that warm weather, I wonder over to my fall bearing patch of raspberries. These red and yes, yellow raspberries are just getting going come the middle of September. When everyone else is just remembering how good those raspberries they picked in July tasted, I go out in my back yard and eat fresh berries until I darn near puke!

The red fall bearers, "Heritage" and "Autumn Bliss", are very sweet and quite large. The yellow bearers, "Golden Harvest" are medium sized and have a distinctly different flavor than what most people are used to. However, according to some resources I've read that the yellow Raspberries have the highest sugar content of all the raspberries. My yellow Raspberries bear very heavily and I usually can't use them all myself so I'm giving away yellows as much as I can. That isn't as easy as easy as it sounds. Most people shy away from the yellow Raspberries because they think all Raspberries are supposed to be red so therefore these yellow ones must be diseased or something. That is certainly NOT the case. If you have enough courage to taste a yellow Raspberry you'll probably want to plant some yourself.

Planting fall bearing Raspberries is a good idea for those people that don't want to work too hard. When you're done harvesting the berries in the fall, you simple cut them all down. This is where fall bearing Raspberries differ from summer bearing Raspberries. Summer bearing Raspberries are biennial where they grow the first year (primocanes) and produce fruit on the second year canes (flurocanes). Fall bearing canes, also known as everbearers, will however produce fruit on the first year canes. If left for another season, you will receive another small crop of berries during the summer lower down on the canes, but the harvest is usually very small and not of as good quality as the fall crop. Most growers of the fall bearing varieties sacrifice the smaller summer crop for a more abundant and higher quality fall crop by simply mowing down the patch after the harvest every autumn.

Hopefully you are interested enough in growing some of these easy to grow fruits that you will dig up an area of your yard and plant some next spring. The easiest way to get started is to find someone you know that already grows Raspberries and get some of their sucker shoots. Raspberries do tend to spread quite well so if someone is growing Raspberries already they will probably be more than willing to give you some of their new sucker shoots. Just bring a shovel and bucket and get ready to have some of the BEST damn fruit on the planet. Of course you'll also have to be a little patient as it will take a couple of years to get the patch established and producing. I'd say the wait is definitely worth it.

For further information on Raspberries, check out these sites:

http://pathfinder.com/@@iDJKgAUAMycSgIqh/vg/TimeLife/CG/Books/E10/Html/E10049X.html

http://www.orst.edu/food-resource/information/raspberries.html

Send any questions or comments to kkoester@plains.nodak.edu

Visit North Dakota State University at http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/