Fruit Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Growing and Gathering

Pruning Raspberry Plants

The berries we grow in our garden are a firm favourite for our family.

Strawberries, Boysenberries, Blackberries, Blueberries and definitely Raspberries.

You can’t beat a bowl of Raspberries with a sprinkling of icing sugar or a scoop of vanilla icecream, or a jar of fresh home made Raspberry jam.

When we first planted our Raspberry patch, we planted just one cane. That was 4 years ago and this is just some of what we have now (there’s more on the other side of this same fence).

Well that was what we did have, before we got pruning.

You can see in this picture that there is a lot of woody looking canes, and it’s just a bit of a mess really.

This is what our Raspberry patch looks like at the end of the season. All the fruiting canes have died off, and the new canes that will fruit in the next Summer are strong and ready to go.

It’s at the end of every fruiting season that you need to prune back all your old Raspberry canes, and prepare your patch for the next season.

But a lot of people, new to growing Raspberries, aren’t sure which canes to prune away and which ones to leave.

I could give you the easy answer and say to just prune out the old, dead wood and leave the new canes, but you want to make sure you know exactly which is which before you get cutting, right?

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Cherries Falling Off The Tree?

When our garden starts to bloom, it is the most beautiful and exciting sight. Because our garden is a predominantly edible garden, those blooms don’t just make our backyard look pretty, they also offer the promise of loads of fresh, …

We absolutely love Chillies, and we eat A LOT of them.

Which is why we absolutely have to grow our own, because if we didn’t, come Winter when they are out of season, they easily fetch up to $6 for 5 pretty sad looking red chillies and we’re refuse to pay that much for them.

We have been really lucky with our chilli plants and always get a pretty good crop. But it’s always sad to see these lovely ornamental plants shrivel up and die when Winter sets in.

Well it used to be sad, before we began growing our Chilli plants as perennials.

There are some jobs that I absolutely dread doing in our edible garden.

Not too many, but some that are so difficult, horrible, or painful that I just don’t want to do them.

Pruning our heritage Boysenberry plants is one of those jobs.

I don’t mind digging around in the worm farm, shoveling compost and making fish fertiliser (oh the smell!) but when I know it’s time to cut back the Boysenberries, somehow weeks and months drift by and I still haven’t done it.

Which means that it was totally overdue to be done and with one month of Winter left, time was running out.

So, last week I finally got onto it.

Propagating Boysenberry Plants

Boysenberry plants are a wonderful addition to any edible garden.

When allowed to thrive, they produce loads of fresh, sweet, fat fruit which is delicious whether it’s eaten straight off the bush, still warm from the Summer sun, preserved as Boysenberry jam or frozen and used through the year for fruit pies and smoothies.

As a kid, I remember a friend whose parents had the most prolific Boysenberry bush. We used to sit in the backyard after school and eat as many as we could until all the ripe berries were gone. I always hoped another lot would ripen before I was invited to go around again.

It’s no surprise then that when we first started our garden, and knew we wanted to make it an edible garden, one of the first plants I wanted was a Boysenberry plant.

Pruning Blackberry Plants

Among the many berry plants we have on our 1/4 acre, we have four Navaho Blackberry plants which are an erect, thornless varierty that produce large crops of delicious, fat, sweet black fruit.

Well normally.

This Summer, we didn’t get such a great crop from two of our Blackberry plants.

The fruit was dry and sparse and the plants weren’t looking that healthy.

The other two plants did really well and produced a fantastic crop. But as always in our garden, we want more!

Pruning Raspberry Plants

Cherries Falling Off The Tree?

Growing Perennial Chilli (or Chili) Plants

Pruning Your Boysenberry Plants

Propagating Boysenberry Plants

Pruning Blackberry Plants

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