We love raspberries around here…

May 31, 2009

If you grew up in Michigan out in the country, you’d remember picking the black and red raspberries directly off the vine in late July. These weren’t cultivated, they just grew everywhere at the edge of wooded areas. In the Northeast, we have great luck with these too. I’ve been growing them for 4 years and every year my crop increases, sometimes we still have fruit growing on the vine until early December. They never make it into the house – my older adorable just eats them straight from the vine (luckily no pesticide).

This year I moved my raspberry bed around to the back of the garage so I could spread out my shoots and yield a larger crop. It took all of 30 minutes for my mom (my trusty garden helper) and I to dig out the sod, rake the soil to loosen it up, and spread the manure (mmm, mmm manure). Then it took another 30 minutes to dig up the canes from their original home and transplant them. FYI, I’m still digging new shoots from the old garden – they keep popping up everywhere. Then we spread mulch and we were done. Still need to rig up some sort of support for the vines to lean on and some edging. We’ll get there.

Funny Greenwich story: We were having friends to the house for dinner who had a 5 year old daughter. I took her down to the raspberries to pick some and she looked at me with the saddest eyes and said, “Can’t you buy them??”