Focus on… Raspberries
Next week: Focus on sowing for autumn harvests, harvesting blueberries, sowing Asian vegetables, harvesting and storing herbs, try edible hibiscus.
NO allotment or edible garden would be complete without raspberry canes, but how do you ensure that your yields are abundant, flavoursome and healthy?
The classic red raspberry is a suckering shrub native to Europe, so it’s well suited to cool, moist garden conditions. Look also for yellow-fruited types such as ‘Alpengold’, and blackfruited American varieties like ‘Starlight’, which claim a richer flavour.
Canes are either bristly or spine-free. There are two cropping types: floricane (summer-fruiting) and primocane (autumn-fruiting). Summer varieties, depending on which you choose, will be ready for harvest from now (like ‘Glen Moy’) to mid-August (‘Leo’). They bear fruit on canes produced the previous year, so prune out fruited stems after cropping and tie in new stems to replace them; they need a post and wire system.
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