[FLPERMACULTURE] a curiosity in my garden

[Andria Crowjoy]

Thank you!! These aren't cultivated at all, just volunteers in our little woods, but I'm happy to encourage them to be less unruly. :D



----- Original Message ----
From: Joel and Sarah Gagnon <Joel.and.Sarah.Gagnon at lightlink.com>
To: fingerlakespermaculture at lists.mutualaid.org
Sent: Wednesday, July 9, 2008 12:18:05 PM
Subject: Re: [FLPERMACULTURE] a curiosity in my garden

The tipping of the blacks needs to be done on the new shoots
when they reach the relevant height (new plants are tipped lower than
established ones). That is in early July around here. It isn't too late
to do it now, even if  it means cutting off 18 inches that they
might have grown beyond the tipping height. If they are tipped at more
than 3 1/2 feet the berries are then hard to reach and the canes become
apt to break under load due to the greater leverage of the fruit. If you
get to it in a timely way, you can just break the tender ends of the
shoots off. Later on you need scissors or pruning shears as the tissue
stiffens.

Red raspberries are not usually tipped. They are headed back in the
spring to live wood and naturally branch. You may even have to thin the
number of canes to get good fruit size. So-called everbearing raspberries
fruit on both the previous year's growth (in July), and on the current
year's new canes in the fall. That fall crop is at the tip of the canes,
so you don't want to cut it off. The resultant branching would fruit, but
fruiting would be delayed. That means you might not get it at all, since
with many of these cultivars fruiting runs into the period of risk for
freezes, which ends the season.

To encourage fruiting in your reds, give them plenty of sun, keep organic
matter content up in the soil, either by mulching or using compost
(Raspberries don't like mulch, but they put up with it. I wouldn't even
think of growing them without mulch -- too much work!), and feed them
well. I use urine, which is an excellent fertilizer for most fruits
except blueberries.

Joel

At 08:22 AM 7/9/08 -0700, you wrote:

This is great info! I didn't know
exactly which types of berry I had in the fall so I cut some back as you
describe below. Same method for encouraging red raspberries? (which seem
to be fewer and therefore I covet them.) :D

----- Original Message ----
From: Joel and Sarah Gagnon
<Joel.and.Sarah.Gagnon at lightlink.com>
To: fingerlakespermaculture at lists.mutualaid.org
Sent: Wednesday, July 9, 2008 10:57:00 AM
Subject: Re: [FLPERMACULTURE] a curiosity in my garden

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 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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