Operation Reclamation

When I was growing up, I remember having rows of raspberries I could walk through. It was so cool to just walk in the front yard and pluck fresh fruit off some canes and eat them right then and there. We had red raspberries and black raspberries growing. How many rows and how big they were I don’t remember. I only remember eating fresh berries.

Over the years, various places around the yard became neglected and nature had its way. I lived away from home for several years and when I came back, I looked at where the raspberry patch use to be. Due to how black raspberries propagate, they would bend over to the ground, take root again and start another mound. Eventually they had all congregated into a corner and brambled while various trees and shrubs had usurped the old patch. The red raspberries had few survivors, but they were there. The bramble in the corner still produced berries but there weren’t a ton, and they were all fighting each other. Well, I wanted my patch back.

First things first were clearing out the trees. I had some friends and my brother help take away the limbs. I wasn't sure how best to go about moving the raspberries and let them grow until the next season. Before I would move them however, I would spend my free time looking for the roots.

There was also a larger tree at the end, and I knew it wasn’t going to help with the sun I would need.

It took a bit but I soon had a small section to work with.

I didn’t want to deal with too many weeds and was just figuring out the best ways to make this patch thrive. I laid down some landscape fabric to both keep my rows straight and to shake its fist at weeds.

Then I started to transplant.

If a raspberry has keeled over and re-rooted, I can snip it in two and suddenly I have two plants so that made it easy to fill out my rows. A little too easy. I saved the second row for any reds I could find (I think originally, I had pulled no more than half a dozen and my rows could fit almost thirty plants with my spacing). I had my first three rows and a whole lot of bramble left but this would do for the first year.

Even with the few dozen black raspberries I moved, I still managed to get enough berries out of them to make some jam. I was ecstatic. I wasn’t sure how they would handle being moved but once they were given their own space, they did so much better than those left jumbled together.

My second year, I finally got my own rototiller which made the expansion project so much easier! I cleared away a few random tree or shrub stragglers trying to grow and tilled up the next section. I never had gold raspberries before, so I purchased about twenty-five bare roots of them just to add variety. I placed my fabrics and poles and started transplanting. I didn’t realize how many raspberries were still growing over there and would add another row. Then I would recruit a friend and transplant another row. Then I recruited another friend, let him take home about fifteen plants and moved another row. Lastly, I figured I could squeeze an eighth row with what was left and successfully moved all the raspberries into rows. I even found a few more red raspberry plants still kicking from the original bramble and placed them with the rest.

Then came berry season. There were so many raspberries coming in and I didn’t even get to really nitpick on how to take care of them.

I researched some techniques to really set them up for success such as clipping them certain ways to encourage branching but for now there were berries to pick. The red raspberries were still coming into their own and didn’t give off too much, but they did multiply which easily let me fill out their row of nearly thirty plants with what started as maybe four or five, six at best.

So anyways, berries. I had three separate jam sessions and there was more leftover to attempt some black raspberry wine and random pickings for the joy of it. Also, smoothies. I walk through the rows almost every day or every other day just to train the branches and see what my work had produced. Even the newly transplanted ones have given great primocanes for me to work with for next year and I have a feeling that 2022 berry season will be popping.

I was so excited about how great these black raspberries were doing and how the red raspberries have multiplied that I forgot about the yellow raspberries that suddenly fruited after the black raspberries were done. My first yellow raspberry and it was homegrown, and giant.

There may not be enough for yellow jam but having that fruit in arms reach is enough for now.

With my free time and desire for raspberries, I was able to reclaim part of my childhood. I even built and expanded on it so hopefully my nieces and nephews (and maybe kids one day) will have similar memories.

I may not be an expert or anything on growing raspberries but I learned as I went and I think it came out pretty well for a hobby. I now also have some other gardening and planting projects in the works such as my mulberry lane (Creating mulberry jam was painstaking but delicious). The thing that really needs some love now are those grapevines…