Sunday 5 July 2015

... growing raspberries

Hello there everybody,

It is another really horridly hot and humid day here. I simply hate this weather as it makes you feel like you have been wrung out. I work a wee bit in the garden and then have to come inside the house for a while to cool off. We do not have air conditioning but because of all the insulation the house stays somewhat cool.

As I have mentioned before, when we bought this land one of the first things we did was start on the kitchen garden. We both love raspberries so we put in a good long border full of several different varieties of raspberries and blackberries. We even dug up and transplanted our raspberry canes from our old house as they are an exceptional variety. Do not ask what they are as I have no idea. I bought them over 20 years ago via mail order from someone.

Then we started to work on the house and did not have the time for the last two summers to do much of anything in the garden. We are paying the price for that now, in a huge way.

Raspberries are really energetic little fellows. They love to grow where you have planted them but they also LOVE to explore. And they do this by sending out underground runners which pop up all over the place and turn into new plants. As you can see from this photo.
 

Now if you are doing the Permaculture idea and do not mind their wandering ways, that is all well and good. For myself, I like to keep things a bit more under control. For one thing, this garden is bursting with perennial weeds. I am sure you can see them in the photo. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to get in there and get the weeds out. And you know the old saying ... "one years seeding is 7 years weeding".

I began at the other end of the garden this summer, cleaning out the bed as best I could. These are the canes from the old house. To begin with, they are not nearly as adventurous as the new canes we bought. I have managed to get them a bit under control but the bed is still full of couch grass.


I have made the decision to dig up all the rest of the bed completely and transplant all the raspberry canes into a part of the field behind our house. We will create a sort of hedgerow out there and we can leave space to tuck in other hedgerow plants like hawthorn, elderberry, etc. They can go as crazy out there as they want to. I will leave the bed empty for the rest of the summer and fall and every week or so I will go at it as the weeds attempt to regrow. Hopefully I can get it cleaned out. If all goes well, I will transplant our old canes into the cleaned out area, separating them as I go to make more plants. Then I hope I can get rid of the couch grass where they are growing now. A huge task I know but I do not see any other way to do it. I will do additional posts when we actually get to the planting part.

Thanks so much for stopping by today. Have a great day. Cheers.



 

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