When buying raspberries they sell them as five canes. Does this mean one plant with five canes shooting up or five individual plants with one cane shooting up? :-[
When I plant them is there anything special I should do or just bung them into the ground? I would have recently manured the soil and I plan to give a thick mulch to help suppress weeds. I will also install upright posts with horizontal wire supports before planting. Should I add FB&B or some sort of general fertilizer and is there any pruning I should be doing?
hi,
five canes=five plants ie. set of roots with 1 cane each.
if purchased from garden centres, they're usually all tied together in a small bag of compost, which sounds like the ones you have seen, rather than bare rooted canes which are normally supplied wintertime.
i purchased 3 years ago 10 canes for £10, the planting suggestion was to plant into well prepared soil, like you described, but soaking the canes thoroughly first.
i was a but unsure when i separated them as most of the compost fell away and i wondered whether this bunch of roots would survive! (happily all but 1 did).
support will be necessary for the growing canes, and pruning would depend on which variety you've got eg. summer or autumn fruiting?.......
Thanks Kerry, I think the ones I am talking about are bare rooted, they will be supplied around Nov time. As for pruning, five are late summer (Malling Jewel) and the other five are Autumn (Autumn Bliss). :)
hi,
mine are autumn bliss. the instructions given to me with my plants, and from my own research, suggest that the fruited canes should be cut back to ground level during february, and the new canes will provide the fruit. i understand that autumn fruiting varieties fruit on the current (new) season's growth.
i have to confess i was rather greedy when i planted mine, i could not bear to cut them back, consequently i had a small crop of berries, but the plants did not start to perform properly until i had done what i was supposed to in the first place, cutting the old stems out!
i did add blood fish and bone to the planting area, along with the manure/compost.
i can't advise you on your late summer plants, as i'm not sure when these should be pruned-perhaps someone else here will know.
it's taken my plants a year or so to get established but they are now popping up new shoots all over, which is very encouraging-and i'm currently enjoying the berries off the plants.
yum yum, berries in september and october! :)
Jesseveve
when you plant them cut them down short, to within a few inches of the ground.
Once established, with summer raspberries you cut the canes that have fruited right out as the fruit comes on the previous years canes.
So next year you'll get no summer fruit -just canes for the year after. But you should get raspberries from your autumn bliss.
There's probably a factsheet on the ken muir website explaining it all in more detail.
Jeremy
P.S. Kerry -autumn raspberries are on my list for this winter :D
Thanks for that, the mud begins to clear! I have ordered them from Ken Muir so I am hoping some instructions arrive with the plants, but wanted to ask just incase there are no instructions, then I'd have a panic of what to do.
Now I know when to prune ....
I have just taken oer a cultivated plot whose previous ownhas grown a lot of summer raspverrys. These are about 10-12 feet tall and some have as many as 12 canes coming from the ground. I have been advised to cut out all but 2 or 3 of the canes and leave these about 4/5 feet in length. This will leave them totally devoid of all levaes.
This sounds rather harsh but my only experience with raspberries is eating them. ;D
So ....
1 - how many canes should I leave on each plant once I have cut out all of the canes that have previously fruited and
2 - how long should I leave the pruned canes ?
Please help ....
Learner Gardner,
again try www.kenmuir.co.uk, click on 'Ask Ken' and in Horticultural Advice section there's a file on raspberries. It talks about distances between canes and about pruning.
Jesseveve -you may well get the book that all this is in with your order, I did with one of mine.
Jeremy