Coastal Cash Crop: Raspberries

Harvesting raspberries in late July

It has become quite popular of late to try growing your own food in the backyard (or front yard for that matter). However many home gardeners have limited space, so the question becomes:  which vegetables or fruits are going to give me the greatest return for the time and money spent?

My answer, if you live on the Oregon coast, is to try raspberries.  

One of the great joys of the garden is to pick fresh fruit in season, and raspberries have to be one of the most loved.  Living in western Oregon, we are fortunate that our climate is just right for nurturing these wonderful fruits, along with many other types of berries.  Mild winters, slightly acid soil that is high in organic matter, plentiful water but low rainfall during harvest season.  They are easy to plant and care for, and easier still to harvest.  The work is mostly in the preparation and planning, and your efforts will be repaid tenfold.

Red raspberries are classified as summer-bearing or fall-bearing, to keep it simple.  Start reading on berries and they will go into all kinds of detail on the types of canes and how they fruit.  For the beginner, start with a vigorous summer-bearing type and purchase disease-free stock from a nursery.  A bundle of bare root plants is a cheap investment, usually $10-15.  Each of these rooted sticks will multiply into several canes within the first year, and bear fruit the second.  

You need to find a sunny place for a permanent well-drained row, 10' or so to start.  Pick a spot with good sun exposure for most of the day and open air circulation, and if your soil stays wet at any time, build it up into a raised (12-18" high) row before planting.  At each end you need a sturdy post 6' tall, to which you can attach a foot long horizontal crossarm at the top.  Then a couple sets of wires, one at 2' high and the others attached to your crossarms.  Then once you plant the row of starts they will simply grow up inside the encircling wires.   (See the diagram in OSU publication below.)

Provide your raspberries with a good annual side-dressing of a rich compost-- don't pile against the canes-- sometime between late fall and late spring.  I like to clean out my chicken coop and make a row of the straw-based material along the side of the raspberry row, about one foot away, in late fall.  It slowly degrades over the winter and in spring the well-fed plants are ready to grow!  You could also use well-composted steer manure or mushroom compost.  An annual side-dressing of complete organic fertilizer in spring is helpful.

My simplified pruning approach is to cut out the old canes (that had fruit on them this year) in late summer, after all the fruit is done.  It's easiest at this stage to see what's a new cane and what's old.  The new canes will be fruiting next year.  Thin out the canes somewhat, so there is plenty of air circulation.  If you want to keep it really tidy, you can loosely tie the new canes to the wires to hold them apart.  Then before winter I remove all the old leaves, top the canes at about 6' tall, and rake up all the debris underneath.  That's it for my pruning.

If you want fall-bearing raspberries you can be even lazier, and just cut them all to the ground in winter.  The new canes that come up in spring will bear fruit in late summer or fall that year.  There are more complicated ways to manage the pruning and maximize yield, but these are refinements rather than requirements.

My pick for a great cultivar of summer red raspberries is 'Saanich.'  Our 2-year old row (10' long) produced around 75 pints of berries this summer, we kept track.  And here's where I come back to that point about payback.  A few hours of pruning and feeding, casual watering as needed through summer, and I literally harvested hundreds of dollars in fruit this year.  Local berries were 3-4 dollars per HALF pint in our area.  I had berries for freezing, fresh eating, jam and still plenty to give away to friends and family.

Can your pumpkin patch measure up?

More information and sources on red raspberries:

Growing Raspberries in Your Home Garden, a publication by Oregon State University

Raspberry Cultivars for Western Oregon, also from OSU

One Green World - mail order fruit nursery in NW Oregon

Raintree Nursery - mail order fruit nursery in SW Washington state

Fruits and Berries (Rodale's Successful Organic Gardening)  a good general guide for organic berries

Can't stop the rain, but a good layer of mulch helps

A windy night followed by a rainy day.  Thus we have a typical start to November on the Oregon coast.

As we move into late fall, most of the usual season-ending chores are completed.  The vegetables harvested, the leaves mostly (if not all) picked up, patio furniture cleaned and stored in a dry place.  But have you mulched?

One of the most critical and commonly overlooked tasks is soil protection.  On the central coast of Oregon we not only receive our share of high winds throughout winter, but (not surprisingly) the majority of our annual rainfall.  It doesn't often arrive in a gentle mist but instead with firehose-like force.  Sometimes the rain seems to fall here unrelated to gravity; rather it appears to be driven out of the sky and pounded into the earth.

Studied gardeners know that keeping planting beds free of foot traffic is good practice for avoiding compaction. Compaction is the enemy to thriving plant roots, as the air (pore) spaces are eliminated.  When this happens, not only is it difficult for the roots to expand and grow deeper, but they have a tough time accessing water and nutrients, not to mention necessary oxygen.  Yes, those roots need to breathe!

Heavy rainfall compacts soil just as surely as our heavy tracks, not to mention displacing much of your carefully managed topsoil down the street gutters and into our storm drains.  A good layer of mulch on exposed soil will do wonders to mitigate both issues and protect your soil.

Mulch can be as simple as a 2 or 3-inch layer of barkdust or "beauty bark"-- although our public works department is encouraging use of the more chunky bark pebble or the rough material known as "hog fuel."  Hog fuel is often free from tree services, the mixed roughly cut product of their branch chipper.  Bark dust is apparently causing increased maintenance of storm drains due to the very fine dust that is flushed away.

Another great free mulch option is to place a thin layer of your lawn clippings (1-2") on bare soil areas, provided it's not full of weed seeds.  Straw is easy to come by in the fall from valley farmers, usually wheat or oat straw, and sometimes "grass" straw from the grass-seed fields.  I prefer oat straw, and place a nice layer over my veggie garden beds with cover crop seed sown underneath.

Unique to the Willamette valley is the option of hazelnut (filbert) shells from area farms, which make a semi-permanent mulch that is quite effective at preventing weeds.  A very permanent mulch option is the variety of rock materials we have here, from round river-type rock to lava rock (somewhat out of place here) to locally sourced beach rocks/shells and even commercially harvested and crushed oyster shell.  These materials can be a nice option for paths or permanently planted beds, especially next to gutters and downspouts where the rock will minimize mud-splash onto adjacent buildings.