Planting Raspberries, How to Grow Raspberries, Growing Raspberries at Home

The best tips for planting raspberries when home gardening.

Learn the difference between summer bearing, and everbearing types of raspberry plants.

Also learn how to plant, care for, maintain and harvest raspberries in your backyard.

Because they are priced likes rubies in the supermarket, (when you can find them at all), raspberries are an extremely rewarding fruit to grow in the home garden.

By choosing a variety that bears in July and again in the fall, you will have plenty of fresh berries and a surplus to freeze or make jams and jellies.

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Types of Raspberries:

Summer Bearing and Everbearing

Summer Bearing

When planting raspberries of the summer bearing type, it is best to plant one year old transplants because the plants do not produce until their second year.

They yield a month-long harvest in late summer.

Summer bearing raspberries need to be supported and trained to grow on a fence or trellis.

They also need to be pruned at the end of the growing season.

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Everbearing

Also known as fall bearing, the everbearing type raspberry is an ideal choice for the home garden.

Everbearing raspberries send up new shoots each year that will produce berries later in the summer.

The plants do not need support.

The harvest lasts for several months.

The longer harvesting period in late summer often lasts until it is ended by heavy frosts in late autumn.

At the end of the season, the plants are cut back to ground level.

New shoots will appear the following spring.

How to Grow Raspberries

Planting Raspberries--Summer Bearing

Planting raspberries can take place in fall or springtime.

Buy 1 year canes and set out around 2 ½ feet apart.

As the fruit stems become established, each stem forms several suckers.

Eventually a single row will become 3-4 foot wide.

Prune wandering shoots and weak stems to keep the berry patch manageable.

Caring for Summer Bearing Raspberry Bushes

Annual feeding and pruning are necessary gardening chores that accompany planting raspberries.

Trimming or cutting back and fertilizing in the spring is required as well.

In early spring, shorten the tall canes by about a third, before they leaf out.

Harvesting Raspberries

Storing Raspberries

The best way to store raspberries is by freezing.

Pick the berries directly into the plastic freezer containers that you plan to use for storage.

Unless you prefer a sugar or syrup pack, simply seal the containers and set them in the freezer.

Raspberry Uses

A delicious reason for planting raspberries is making raspberry jam or jelly for filling tarts, freezing berries for winter use, or making fruit syrup to fill between layers of chocolate cake.

Raspberry pie and cobbler are always favored desserts.

Other suggestions for mouth-watering raspberry desserts are ice cream or sherbet made with fresh or frozen berries, summer or winter.

Raspberry Plant Pests

If the leaves of your growing raspberries have been skeletonized, suspect the Japanese beetle.

This shiny green insect is about a half inch long and has copper brown wings.

Set up pheromone beetle traps, making sure to place them no closer than 50 feet from vulnerable crops.

Handpick stragglers.

Canes infested with the raspberry root borer break off easily at the base and show an overall lack of vigor.

The canes may also wilt and die in early summer.

You can often find the white ½ inch grubs feeding in the crown or the roots.

A sure method of controlling root borers is to cut the infested canes below the soil line and destroy them.

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Planting Raspberries to Vegetable Gardening

Planting Raspberries to Growing Raspberries

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