The Damsel will be the first to admit she’s no expert on raspberries. She is highly expert on eating them, and getting mighty scratched up trying to fool with her raspberry patch.
What little she knows, she is happy to share with you.
Raspberries grow on long, willowy, prickly wands (properly called canes). They grow straight up from the ground without branching. They produce fruit on last year’s canes. That is, one year a cane will grow, get all long and stuff, nice and leafy, but no raspberries in sight. The next year raspberries will form on these one-year-old canes, while at the same time new canes (for next year) are also growing up, all mixed in together.
Then, once the canes produce fruit, they die. That’s all they live for. Once they’ve made their beautiful little fruit, they lose their will to survive and it’s all over. These canes can then be pruned out.
The Damsel likes to do this the following spring, early before the new canes start growing. The reason she likes to do it then is:
1. There’s less stuff to contend with–the weeds haven’t started growing yet, nor the new canes. All she has is the canes that will fruit this year and the old dead ones from last year.
2. It’s a little easier to tell everything apart. The two kinds of canes each have their own look. The Damsel will attempt to show you what she means by this.
Let’s be honest. Last year’s canes have a sad, dead look. There’s this whitish, papery layer on the wood, and the canes are brittle. Sometimes they’ll break right off in your hands before you even have a chance to cut them out. Many will have already broken off, pushed down by snow or large dog-shaped horses.
The live canes will have little buds of growth, a lighter color, more flexible, and if you cut them they will have a live, greenish layer in their wood. They will also strive with all their might to snag your ponytail and scratch your arms and poke you in the eye.
Snip the dead ones as close to the ground as you can reasonably manage, and attempt to remove the cut cane from the rest. Not as easy as it sounds, because it likes to tangle itself with its brother canes and stab humans. That’s what kind of creature we’re dealing with.
Here’s an area of the Damsel’s raspberry patch that has been pruned. Notice the live canes reaching out toward her in a menacing way. And the bonus PVC pipe sticking up in the middle. Don’t trim or cut the live canes at all. Berries form all the way out to their ends, so trimming them back means less Berries 4 U.
It’s hard to believe, but soon, these claw-looking thorn-infested canes will be covered with lush green leaves and delicious red berries. (And they will still be prickly and pokey as ever.)
Love hurts.
