If you plan to plant some raspberries in your garden in the spring, it is worth doing some thorough preparation. If possible, choose a north-south orientation for row planting in a sunny spot, with firmer soil and sheltered from cold north winds. In such conditions, the plants will thank you with a good harvest even for a couple of decades if they grow in the same place. This is of course if you take some time to care for the plants, not just during the picking of berries.
To prevent raspberries from "walking" to your neighbors in a city garden, leave about 1 m of mowed area between the garden and the planting row. When digging the planting trench, carefully pick out all the roots of perennial weeds - it will be very troublesome to weed them out between the raspberries later. Once this work is done, the trench should be filled with plenty of well-composted organic matter. The appropriate width of the trench is 50 cm. Plant in one row and 40-60 cm between plants in the row. If you have enough plant material, then rather more densely so that there is less room for weeds in the first few years. Later, the raspberries themselves will fill the entire growing area vigorously and the main work will be cutting out excess shoots. It is best to leave 10 strong stems per running meter, and 5-6 stems when growing as a bush. A significant harvest can only be expected in the third year.
The best time to plant bare-root plants is the end of September and October - when the first frosts have stopped the plant's growth. Since raspberry buds open quite early in the spring, time can be short in a busy spring - the buds can open before the ground allows for preparations. This year's cool spring has provided enough time for this work. However, there are no problems with potted seedlings, because they can be planted throughout the season. Place the seedlings in the soil at the same depth as they were before. To make it easier to tolerate the summer drought, raspberries are truly grateful for mulching the growing surface. Unneutralized peat, hardwood sawdust or other decorative organic material that is handy enough is very suitable for this. In addition to retaining moisture, using mulch also helps save time on controlling annual weeds. During long droughts, the plants must be watered properly.
Most raspberry varieties bear fruit on the second year's shoots, meaning that at the same time as the crop is ripening, the raspberry grows shoots that will bear fruit the following year. Examples of varieties bred in Estonia include:
'Alvi' - beautiful large dark red conical fruits, good spicy sweet and sour taste, high yield, late ripening, winter hardy
'Espe' - shoots almost without thorns, fruits quite large, red, flesh juicy, good taste; good winter hardiness, replacement shoots average
'Siveli' - medium-sized round fruits, juicy, good taste, medium maturity, high yield, good winter hardiness
The so-called remontant varieties, which bear fruit in the first year of growth, bear fruit quite late in our short summer conditions and the harvest may be lost in the event of an early night frost. The best known and slightly earlier of these are the red-fruited varieties 'Babe Leto' and 'Polka'.
To prevent the spread of diseases to young shoots, old shoots should be cut out immediately after the harvest. However, if this was not done in the fall, you can console yourself that the old stems have supported the next year's fruit stems from breaking under the weight of the snow in the winter.
If you have a stove or fireplace in your household and as a result, you have a lot of (leaf) wood ash, which seems to be superfluous, then this is a very good thing for destroying pathogens - sprinkle it on raspberries in the spring before the buds open. And in order not to share the expected harvest with raspberry beetle offspring, you could spray them with an aqueous solution of the more environmentally friendly plant protection product NeemAzal-T/S when the flower buds open and before the flowers open. Nettle infusion is also good for this.