Raspberries I Have Known

I finally finished cleaning up the raspberries, the job that should have been done in April. Only two months behind--not all that bad. And I learned a thing or three by being late. 1. I didn't do any irreparable damage by being late. The canes are tall (but not over my head) and berry covered. 2. I may, however, have done my body irreparable damage, because having to cut out dead canes when everything is so tangled together causes considerable scratching and sinking in of thorns. 3. I need to believe in what the canes are telling me, whether it's April or June. In other years, when I have cut the canes back just as the leaves were breaking dormancy, I didn't believe that some canes only had buds near the bottom, or half way up, while some were showing signs of leafing out all the way to the end, so I left them all about the same height, resulting in lots of half-dead canes poking out everywhere. By being late, I observed that some, indeed, only leaf out near the bottom. Some halfway up. Some all the way up (except for the very tip). There is actually an advantage to being late, which is that you can weed the patch while you're cutting the canes, something you can't do in early spring.

So, despite the fact that this job took several hours over several days, I think I have a pretty nice finished product. I was able to tuck the canes neatly between the wires, where they will stay until the first bad thunderstorm--longer if I'm lucky. These are everbearing raspberries. I've been known to call them "overbearing" raspberries (and not in the sense that they bear too much fruit--more like the co-worker who keeps reminding you how much he enjoys his yacht and Ferrari). In two or three weeks I'll be calling them sweet raspberries. Next April, I'll be calling them overbearing raspberries again, I just know it.