I haven’t had the greatest success with home-grown raspberries. Yet.
I’m fortunate enough to have wild raspberries in many forms in my backyard.
I will never give up on raspberries because they are one of my favorite fruits. Black Raspberries specifically. If you’ve never had black raspberries before, I highly recommend you try them. There is a local farm that has “pick-your-own” black raspberries. Once I was introduced to them, I was hooked.
It’s been my hope to be able to pick this many black raspberries out of my own backyard.
But even though I know they take a few years to get established, I have still been pretty disappointed in mine.
I’ve gotten a few.
Never more than a handful.
Which is why I was so caught off guard by the absolute MESS that my black raspberries have turned into!
Raspberries grow on second year canes. Once the canes grow tall enough they will produce shoots. The fruit will grow on those shoots.
Seemingly overnight, my black raspberry shoots grew and grew and grew. I estimate some of them are 15-16 feet long.
The good news is: I should have a LOT of berries on my bushes this upcoming season (theoretically).
The bad news is: It looks TERRIBLE!
We initially tried to stake them with 4-foot stakes. Those are the green poles you see. Then we tried to tie them up with horizontal lines up high but quickly realized that they just kept growing, curling downwards, and tip-rooting into the soil.
*Tip-rooting is when the end of the shoot roots into the soil and creates an entirely new bush*
I have some ideas on how to prune them but that really shouldn’t be done until late winter/early spring. So I have a few more weeks of it looking like this.
This Friday Fail will be staring me in the face every time I go outside until March.
Well, it sounds like this beast will become a beauty, you just have to wait. 😌