Properly plant and care for raspberries is not difficult. If you follow a few simple tips, you can easily provide yourself with raspberries from your garden ecologically.
Contents
Planting raspberries: the preparations
Before you plant raspberries in your garden, you should pay attention to a few things:
- Choose a species and variety
- Choose the right location
- You may also need to prepare the soil
There are two main types of raspberries:
- Summer raspberries
- Autumn raspberries
Summer raspberries can be harvested around July. Autumn raspberries ripen later into the fall and are somewhat easier to care for. There are different varieties of both types. It’s best to look around for yourself at a garden center or nursery. There you can also get advice on the selection.
For the plants, you should make sure that you choose the right location:
Raspberries need a sunny place.
Also keep in mind that the plants form root runners. Make sure that there is enough space available.
If you don’t want your entire garden to become a huge raspberry bed over time, you should border the bed with a special plastic root barrier. If you don’t want plastic in your garden, you can also put curbs in the ground.
Raspberries have no special requirements to the soil. They are only sensitive to waterlogging. If your soil is too heavy, you should make it more permeable with sand.
Planting raspberries: Observe spacing and root growth
Before you start planting, you should build a climbing aid especially for summer raspberries (or buy one here, for example, at** memolife or Amazon). This can be two stakes, between which you stretch wires at a distance of 60 centimeters. Such a climbing aid is really useful, because the rods can grow over two meters long, depending on the variety. You can tie them up on the climbing aid. Without a climbing aid they bend over. This is not a problem. However, harvesting on high-tied canes is much easier. Autumn raspberries remain smaller and do not necessarily need a climbing aid.
How to plant the raspberry plant:
You can plant raspberry plants about 30 to 40 centimeters apart.
Simply dig a hole that is about twice the size of the root ball of your plant. Loosen the root ball of the plant a bit.
Insert the plant, press the soil a little and water very hard.
By the way, the best time for planting is in spring, when no more frost is expected. But even later you can usually plant without problems.
Cut and care for raspberries
Care for raspberries is not difficult. It consists mainly in cutting the plants. With autumn raspberries is particularly simple. They are cut back completely after harvest.
With summer raspberries, you cut off just above the ground all the canes that have borne fruit. You can recognize them by the fact that they are already woody and brownish in the lower area. Leave the strongest of the fresh green shoots at a distance of about ten centimeters. All other shoots can be cut off.
In spring you can fertilize your raspberries lightly. It is best to use organic fertilizer, which you can even make yourself.