How to Start Growing Raspberries [Compilation]

so in the last two years i've taken this little spot along the south side of my garage and transformed it into a really nice raspberry patch and i'm going to show you how i've done that starting in 2014 and then all the way through 2015 because you really need to see a full two year cycle to understand raspberries and i'm doing this because when i was a kid i did exactly what my daughter is doing here i used to go down to my buddy's house and we used to go in his backyard and pick fresh raspberries and see the grasshoppers and the bumblebees it was such a cool experience and i want her to grow up with that as well so i pre-ordered my raspberry plants in february because sometimes they sell out and here's a list of some of my favorite online retailers indiana berries cool because you can buy one at a time now i'm looking for a variety i wanted reds yellows purples even a black raspberry but of course cold hardiness is a big factor as well and then harvest time so you want something that's coming in bloom all throughout the the spring summer and fall so i picked some that bloomed early mid and late season now site selection is a big deal you got to make sure that you're in a spot with full sun and good drainage this little spot has a slope which is perfect but i'm going to amend this soil by mixing equal parts native soil topsoil and compost then i'm going to mix it up really good with my my shovel inside my wheelbarrow and then i dumped it back in to get a good fresh start so i ordered my bare roots to show up in early april or you could do late march in ohio i soak them for five minutes but not more than an hour i spaced them 18 inches to as much as you can even do three feet for some varieties don't bury them more than two or three inches deep and then make sure you compact the soil down so that you don't have any air pockets clip them to invigorate growth now by mid-may you should see growth on these bare roots as they come out of dormancy but by the beginning of june if you don't order replacements right away so that those roots can become established i was pretty lucky all of my plants took off and by august i had one to two feet of growth on most of them but by late september all the plants looked really good and i was getting about a cereal bowl and a half a day between the heritage and the joan j now in the late fall as the raspberry patch starts to go into dormancy the leaves may change color and you may get a little bit of this that's okay from my understanding i ran it by the extension and then save all the leaves that fall from your trees and shred them for compost next year now we're going to do our pruning in late winter because at that point all the carbohydrates have run back down into the roots so in late february as soon as the snow melts you're going to do your pruning and we're going to prune out all of the primocane fruiters so anything that fruited last year we're going to cut out and you can kind of tell the difference between varieties just by looking at the canes this is a royalty the color's distinct prune as close to the ground as you possibly can that's heritage i've pulled that all out and then you may want to leave some canes as floricanes to produce for you in the early summer if you do that you want to cut them back maybe a foot past the trellis wire so here i am it's all done i have some flora canes to produce in the early summer and the rest of these will shoot up and and produce for me this year now i'm actually going to pull out one of these i don't like this berry it's called willamette i planted it in 2013. i'm getting that out of there and we're going to replace it with a brand new variety that just came out called nywat this is a black raspberry that produces on the first year canes the primocanes so that's very unique they've never had that before and as a little tip throw down cayenne pepper that'll help keep away rabbits they seem to like these bare roots now i did not fertilize last year because it was the year of planting but i am gonna do it now two times a year once in early april once in early june and then that's it for the year i will not fertilize after the fourth of july so by mid-may you're going to see the last of the signs of winter damage and you're going to want to prune those fluorocanes out of there so i have a fluorocane here that started to produce laterals but then it drooped down and the leaves turned black well that's just from winter injury yank that out of there so the other thing i'm doing in mid-may is setting up a native bee house with some leaf cutter bees bees are going to be your best friend with a raspberry patch because they will help the raspberries become bigger and more round and you'll get more yield so i'm putting out my cocoons here in mid-may more on that later and then the other thing you're going to be looking for on your floor canes especially is in mid-may you're looking for any signs of pests here so i'm coming out those are some primocanes that's the fall gold this is my tailor you can see that the floor canes are producing some laterals maybe eight to ten inches in length already and i'm actually starting to get some buds shooting out but look out for fruit worms that's going to be the first thing you're going to see in the spring here and these things can do some pretty good damage to your leaves so the way to take care of these things when they come out and they will come out all at once one day you may see them kind of running down your trellis water like this because you want to get out and get some neem oil neem oil does the trick for me and what i find is that this is not as harsh of a chemical i think it's even organic but i'm gonna mix one tablespoon of neem oil and then one teaspoon of dr bronner's soap with a gallon of lukewarm to warm water and shake it up really really good and shake it as you're going down and you want to spray the tops the bottoms and the canes so get everything covered really well and stay ahead of this so by mid-june you're going to start to see flowers come in the bees will be very active and pollinating them and uh so this is on the fluorocanes of course the primocanes are still growing and you want to tie those floor canes up to your trellis so the primocanes can get sun and shoot up in the middle so the flowers are coming in pretty good the boin here has got a lot of flowers even though it's a shorter one and yeah this is also mid-june again so i'm going to put down my second and final application of fertilizer i'm gonna do about three cups of it here maybe one cup for every ten feet and kind of get down in there and sprinkle those pellets i like the pellets more than the liquid stuff it seems to last a little longer i'm also updating my trellis wire because these berries are going to be pretty heavy so i'm adding a tensioner and i'm going to tighten up the line as well and in mid june you may see some spider mites this is the kind of damage they do the mites get under the leaves and they suck out the chlorophyll making them a little yellow now if you want to double check what you have i would recommend getting a little magnifying glass and looking under your leaves just to make sure you've got them and these are two spotted spider mites that i had those things do a lot of damage use neem oil to get rid of them so now it's mid july and all those flowers have blossomed into ripe red raspberries so i'm very excited about picking my first crop here and it's been pretty good so far this is also the time in mid-july that you'll begin to see flowers coming in on many of your prima cane producers like the heritage here all right and this is the royalty raspberry we're getting a lot of berries on this this is the week that it's really beginning to produce and it seems to come in like all at once you're not gonna have it trickle out over three or four weeks um and the berries are really deep purple and they're very large actually i mean look at the size of this berry that's that's gigantic it produces on a floricane the primocanes are behind it here coming up from the middle and they come up you prune them and they start to branch out like a tree so i pruned my purple royalty when it reached 36 inches in height by taking off the top four to six inches to get it to branch out like a tree and you only do this with purple varieties and with black raspberry varieties okay and then to the right of the joan j is my tailor we have a few floricanes they're coming in right now just like the royalty they're all up they're all going to come in around the same time starting with the boin then to the royalty the the tailor's a little bit behind that even there's two in the back and there's two up front the ones in the back are kind of hard to get to so next year is a little tip for you if you're up against a garage like i am i'm going to tie those floor canes up front so i get easier access to them the tailor is one of the best tasting raspberries you're ever going to have i mean there's nothing that that beats this raspberry um this is a floor cane producer so this will not produce until next year it you may get a little bit on the tip but very little late in the fall um but then these primocanes are getting really really really tall and that's fine because what we're going to end up doing is we're going to end up pruning these back so that they kind of droop over maybe a foot and then that leaves the thickest portion of this cane for next year to support new you know to support the new fruit so around the middle of july that's probably when you're also going to have deer come around because they're going to see those raspberries and go for them i use these bags to get rid of them they're filled with blood and pepper deer hate them and they're great you just take the little string and you can kind of loop it through them and hang it on your trellis wire when i hang these things up i have no issues with deer okay today we're going to trim out these floor canes because they're done fruiting all the laterals that came off of this are done producing fruit and you got to get this out of here or else it's going to promote disease and other pest issues that will end up spreading to your primocanes that are growing this year so you don't want that you got to pull these out as soon as they're done it's a little tricky though because there's a lot of there's a lot of growth here obviously so we're gonna have to get down in there and kind of push our way in so you're going to need a good pair of gloves and you're going to need some pruning shears and if you notice i'm using a set here that has like a curve to it that's the way you want to go because it's a little bit easier to cut these canes we're going to be cutting them as close to the ground as possible and pulling them out today you don't want to let too much above the ground or else you can end up getting new shoots to come out off of them you don't want that because that could also be an entry point for disease and for pest issues so uh take a look at this you'll notice it's a lot different than the other canes around it the leaves start to turn a little bit yellow the the canes themselves start to turn a little red let me show you a close-up of that so i've been using these zip ties and if you notice i'm keeping them kind of loose there so that's just a little tip for you don't put them on so tight that it ends up restricting the water that's flowing up to grow the berries because then it can end up suffocating them basically you're really just keeping this here just to keep the canes from flopping all around especially in the early part of the spring when they're pretty much the only thing that's here the winds and everything can kind of make them slap up against this this trellis wire and then that promotes you know damage and then the damage could lead to you know pest and disease entry points so uh we're gonna clip these off and get started and we're gonna look for any brown canes because the brown canes are the fluorocanes that are done now and they should be pretty easy to identify let me show you a close-up all right if you notice all these canes back here are green so this one's green they're all very bright green those are the primocanes that are growing and then back here this one right here that's our brown that's our brown cane that's our fluorocane that we want to trim out i have a total of three in here it's a little tricky getting access that's right here got it now while we're down here we're also going to look around make sure we don't see any any nests you know any rabbit nests or any mice and if we do you know we're going to be clearing that out here you really want to make sure you don't get rabbits because especially with rabbits they'll come in during the winter time and then they'll come back and they'll chew away at these primocanes so then you won't have them for next year if especially if it's a fluorocane producer you'll end up you know losing more yield now since we're down here too we can also kind of clean out some of these dead leaves and get these out of here because these leaves will also promote disease and pest issues so since we're here we'll clear that stuff out get it nice and clean and that'll help keep our raspberry patch nice and healthy all right hopefully you didn't get too scratched up there but now we've got to finish this off and pull these out now we're going to throw these away we're not going to compost we're not going to do anything other than put these in the trash because if you try to compost them or let them stay again more disease and pest issues so today we pulled out the royalty and the taylor floricanes since they're all done fruiting around the middle of july i pulled out the boins because that's when that finished up um so now that that's all done we have some open space down here let me show you what that looks like okay since we have that open space the cool thing that we can do now is take these primocane fruiters this is the heritage and down there i've got the joan j next to the tailors and we're going to trellis these up and just kind of zip tie them to this top wire to support the weight of the fruit as it comes in and these leaves will also kind of shade that ground since that soil is very exposed now it'll dry out much more quickly so that'll help keep that soil more moist and it'll also keep this fruit if we just let it go it would droop almost all the way down to the ground where rabbits and squirrels and everything else can get to it now that's some nice eye candy these berries look great don't they and i'm getting a lot of them this year this is the heritage i'm showing you these are the primocane producers that are beginning to fruit in the middle of august and the way they kind of turn is they initially are kind of small so they'll look really small and green like that right there and then then they'll start to get a little enlarged like this and still be a little bit green and then pretty much within a day or two they'll switch and start to turn pink and then another day or two they turn red now down here this is my joan j i love this berry it's really good tasting it's a little bit bigger it's a little less tart and it's probably a week or so behind the heritage if you look here you can see there's less red berries right now because it's a little bit behind but that's good that way you're spacing out your harvest over the whole summer so up top you can see there's a ton of berries coming in then down at the very end i have my fall gold this is a very large and very sweet raspberry and it it turns you know it's a little pale yellow here but as it turns really ripe it gets to kind of a deep yellow or goldish looking color very unique flavor i love the fall gold and it's it's great to have in your patch just to mix it up to have a couple of varieties a little bit shorter though it doesn't get quite as tall and it's definitely probably two weeks two to three weeks behind the heritage right now and again when you have production you're gonna get deer coming by so use these bags if you can find them they're very effective at keeping the deer away i hang them probably every three to five feet all the way down my trellis wire so you can see there's a lot of production here a lot we probably get i would say a whole cereal bowl filled with berries every day for about four or five weeks and then it starts to trickle out so the cool thing about the the late summer early fall producers are they don't just bloom all over one week like many of the floricane producers they tend to kind of drag out over a couple of weeks which is really great because then you get a lot of berries every day so you don't get slammed with them all at once and i think in my opinion we're getting a lot more production out of these than we are with the floor canes as well we're really excited about picking some of these and getting ahead of the birds the birds have been our biggest pests so far because they love these as much as we do so i want to show you guys one cool thing this is one of the things i use to get rid of the birds this helps deter them if you leave a couple of these sitting out maybe put a little block of wood in them or something to weight them down or even hang them off your trellis wire the birds tend to get freaked out by any kind of shiny aluminum foil and they're also easily scared too so if you have a couple of pans that can kind of bang together with the wind or whatever that tends to scare them and then they go away but they are still gonna aggressively go after these because they they love them as much as we do so the last thing that i do for the year is in early october or late september i lay down magpo salt that's magnesium potassium sulfate the potassium is really good for berries but it has to be laid down in the right ratio with magnesium this pre-mix helps me with that i put down one pound over 30 feet and then i have fairly alkaline soil so i'm gonna put down about five pounds of soil acidifier and i'm just gonna sprinkle that in and we're just gonna mix it in with a pair of gloves just gently into the soil and then biochar this is the latest thing this is hot stuff and i made it myself i'm very excited to try this it's charcoal azomite worm castings and a little flower to activate it well that's it for this year i hope that this compilation video helps you out and also i hope that you get out there and start your own raspberry patch so check back as next year i will have more updates and in the meantime if you're looking for some education and there's a lot of information that's out there but one of the best and most comprehensive sources that i found was this book this book was put together by all of the cooperative extensions and it's exhaustive so it covers everything and there's also a link to a free pdf that you can get out there so i'm going to put a link to that below and check that out and hey if that helps you out favorite this video because that really helps me out too thanks for listening and good luck i'll see you again next year

Channel: mugs132

Views: 959,019

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Id: 0YYir4xHCQg

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2015