We love raspberries so I planted a bunch… and whoa, they are taking over my whole yard! This is a lot of work! I am sure I skipped a key step here.
What do other raspberry growers do to prevent them from taking over?
Should I just use pots? What other options are there?
Baby raspberries seems to have a real weakness against the lawnmower… Honestly it is more psychological than anything. Just stomp the ones growing where you don’t want them.
This is probably the last year of me having it easy; my daughter is graduating college and leaving the nest. For the last couple of years she has been digging them to sell for $5 a pop.
I kept removing baby plants and after 2 years there are no more. I did plant some recently but in container only.
Nice! I like those options:
-Stomp the ones you don’t like
-Get your kids to make money selling them
Raspberries love to spread by the roots, so unless you put them in a confined bed, you will continue to struggle with spreading roots. Suggest that you relocate them this next dormant season to a raised bed similar to the one I constructed about 20 years ago. My primary reason for constructing this bed was to isolate my raspberry roots from the invasive roots of a 200 year old western red cedar nearby. Prior to this I had noticed that the more I watered the worse my berries performed, so when I dug them up the bed was filled with cedar roots. To solve this issue I put a floor of roof sheets underneath my raised bed lifting it 2-3” off the ground. This gave me an air gap to isolate my raspberry bed from the cedar roots below. Then I constructed the bed around the floor giving me. 1’ deep cedar root free zone. So now the raspberry roots stay inside the containment since they cannot grow thur air! The air gap serves two purposes: keeps cedar roots out and raspberry roots within!
@JamesN … if you mow your yard… really nothing to worry about.
I plant rasberries in beds about 4 ft wide… and various lengths… i have one around 10 ft long… another 14 ft… another around 60 ft, another 20 ft.
Rasberries are not the only thing in all of those beds… that 60 ft bed has apples jujube goumi strawberries… but it also has rasberries.
The raspberries are welcome to spread (and they do) in the bed… but if they come up outside the bed (and they do) they get mowed.
Not a problem at all. Here in TN we mow weekly… and there is just no way raspberries can take over your yard if you are mowing around the raspberry bed.
Thanks @TNHunter, mowing set to begin today!
If you want healthy plants that are productive and less diseases you have to learn the words ‘out of bounds’. You set a boundry and anything outside of those boundries will be pruned, mowed or removed. If you instead want to sell plants then disregard… because a good healthy raspberry crown will provide you with hundreds of offspring.
A good raspberry grower will have a very nice pair of secateurs and be very diligent with them.
Wally-world sells them for 2@$12.00.
Then the rabbits eat them, in my yard.
