THE RIGHT START WITH RASPBERRIES

There's nothing quite like the taste of home-grown raspberries. David Patch shows how to prepare the soil, plant new canes, and carry out the first pruning to set them up for a long, productive life

- David Patch

Books, catalogues, and websites categorise raspberries into two main types: summer-fruiting and autumn-fruiting. Summer-fruiting types are also known as 'floricanes' and generally produce their fruit on one-year-old wood. After planting, in that first summer it will produce a long, tall stem, normally with no side shoots, and no fruit. It's in the second summer that these canes produce side-shoots and bear fruit.

Autumn fruiting raspberries, as the name suggests, fruit in the autumn - but crucially on the new growth, called 'primocanes'. So, if planted this winter, they will grow away and will produce berries in August/September next year.

For pruning, the golden rule is to prune out any canes that have borne fruit that year, either in the summer or autumn. Autumn types are easy - you basically cut all canes back to soil level. With the summer fruiting, it's the older canes that you remove, which are normally easy to spot as they are brown and woody. Leave the new, green canes in place for fruit the following summer.

ADVICE ON PLANTING

Raspberries need a moist, cool soil in order to thrive. If the soil dries out at all in spring or early summer, fewer new shoots will be produced - and fewer shoots means lower yields later down the line. Not only that, but underground roots will go looking for moisture further afield, so you may well get suckers appearing many metres from where you'd like them.