So Cal Raspberry recommendations?

For those of you in Southern California, how would you best achieve season long raspberry fruiting? My goals are:

-Full season fruiting (June through December)
-Upright canes

Here is what I have had success with:
Fall Gold
Heritage
BP-1 (one year)

I am having to mostly start over and I just wanted to see if anyone has good suggestions. I prefer the fall/everbearing varieties to the summer varieties. Thanks!

The raspberry best adapted to your area is Bababerry. Bay Laurel sells it.

I have it in a test area and it is doing well but it seems to be a trailing variety. I am doing more of a permaculture style distribution, clumping them near fruit trees, and that is why I hope to just use the upright ones in the future.

I have found upright ones are not so upright once they bear fruit. I guess if you only harvested the fall crop they would tend to stay upright. I grow Josephine, which has such large berries sometimes even the fall crop need support. I grow both crops, the summer crop can be heavy. Not that they really need it, just makes harvesting much easier. Canes tend to fall to a 45 degree angle on me. So tying them up keeps the patch tidy.
I don’t know if they would work in your area? But Prelude needs little support. Canes are strong.

Hi Drew, you are right. When they get heavy I have just draped the canes over low branches of what is growing nearby. I have Anna which is supposed to be upright but really “semi-upright.”

I just looked up Josephine raspberry, it sounds amazing. I will have to test it. At the risk of oversimplifying, berries in general have more a “photoperiod-dependent” winter cycle, different from stone fruit that is more temperature-dependent. I have had a couple surprising successes (Boyne does incredibly well in San Diego, despite being a Canadian variety bred for winter hardiness). Now that I have a well I can do justice to the experimenting. Over the past several years I was able to prove that no raspberry fruits in Southern California when you dry it out and leave bare ground to bake in 14 hours/day of direct sunlight all summer. All joking aside, I actually think So Cal can make raspberries work with filtered sun/shade, layered matured compost, mulch, and consistent moisture.

Thanks for the suggestions. And yes, I do have prelude, it grew well without support and I find out in 5 months how it fruits here when grown in hospitable soil.

You can use a single stake to help too. It does not look too bad. One could buy decorative stakes.
Usually bigger berries are not that good, but Josephine berries are excellent. Quite larger than most raspberries.
Cool you are zone pushing. I do the same here, just in the other direction.
I had my first pomegranates grown here this year (Michigan zone 5b). Only three, and they were small, but were very high quality.

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I would add Caroline to the mix. It has the traditional raspberry flavor (sweet+tart) and would complement the sweet ones like BP-1 and Fall Gold you already have.

Another technique I tried is to tip the primocanes. The general recommendation is only to tip the summer-bearing/floracane varieties, but I found that with our long season in California, we have two advantages to tip even the ever-bearing ones

  1. Tipping of course produces more shoots increasing the yield of primocane fruits
  2. Tipping also delays fruiting a bit (so far only one year of data on this), so randomly tipping 50-70% of the canes does a season extension of sorts

@JamesN How hot does it get there in the summer?