[FLPERMACULTURE] a curiosity in my garden

[Joel and Sarah Gagnon]

I had a similar mutation about 20 years ago, but mine was not particularly 
productive. Black raspberries do not sucker, unlike reds. Tip rooting is 
the usual way they spread, coupled with seed dispersion by birds.

Are you tipping the plants to promote branching? The usual management 
method for blacks is to nip the tips when they are about 2 1/2 to 3 feet 
tall, which forces them to produce several new shoots just below the 
clipping point. The following spring, these are headed back to a foot or so 
long. Each cane thus has quite a lot of bearing area without being 10 or 
more feet long. They are a lot more manageable that way, especially when 
fruiting. You still get lots of tip-rooted plants (more, in fact), but they 
are distributed in a much smaller area.

Yellow or "golden" variants of red raspberries are generally sweeter and 
milder than their red counterparts. I didn't notice much difference in 
either of those characteristics in my yellow version of a black raspberry, 
and it sounds like you didn't either. From a nutritional perspective, I 
think the anthocyanins are probably a desirable thing, so I have to wonder 
whether the yellow-fruited version of blacks is worth promoting. Kinda like 
white flour...

Joel

At 03:44 PM 7/8/08 -0400, you wrote:

>I've been cultivating a "volunteer" gold raspberry in my garden the past 
>couple years, which looks like a larger and more vigorous relative of the 
>black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis.) When I mentioned it last year to 
>Katie, she sounded surprised that it was propagating from tips instead of 
>runners, and I finally this afternoon got round to looking it up. I 
>learned that tip propagation is a distinctive property of the native 
>Blackcap family, which is quite different from the other raspberry 
>varieties. I was unable to find a commercially available "gold cap", but I 
>did find a mention of it in Wikipedia:
>
>
>"The commercially grown red and black raspberry species each have 
>albino-like pale-fruited variants, generally due to expression of 
>recessive genes affecting production of anthocyanin pigments. Variously 
>called golden raspberries, yellow raspberries, or (rarely) orange 
>raspberries, these fruits retain the distinctive flavor of their 
>respective species, despite their similarity of appearance. In the eastern 
>United States, at least, most commercially sold pale-fruited raspberries 
>are derivatives of red raspberries. Yellow-fruited variants of the black 
>raspberry occur occasionally as wild plants (for example, in 
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio>Ohio), and are sometimes grown in home 
>gardens."
>
>
>The fruit is, indeed, as luscious as a blackcap, but they do have a couple 
>of downsides. One is that they get little dark spots on them when they're 
>a tad bit overripe (caused by individual drupelets drying out around the 
>seed,) and the other is that they propagate *very* aggressively, which 
>makes it hard to maintain a small patch of them. It also means that I have 
>*extra*, if you want to try some.
>
>
>- Marty
>
>
>
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