So what would you guys do?

[steveb4]

i have a 12’ by 30’ patch of everbearing raspberries i literally double fertilized 3 springs ago by accident. nearly killed them the 1st summer and had huge canes that didnt fruit for the last 2 summers after. how can i remedy this? i till 2xs a summer in between rows to keep the sprouts controlled. besides that ive done nothing. they are healthy as hogs otherwise. should i just continue to wait it out? was thinking of tilling in some fine woodchips in between the rows to try and absorb some of the N. they were growing and producing great before i fertilized so in hindsight i should have left them alone in the 1st. place. then i got busy and forgot i had fertilized them once already. luckily i had started a few other small patches in the yard so im still getting some raspberries but im not freezing nearly the amount i would if this patch was producing for me. anyone ever run into this problem? i would have thought it would have fixed itself by now.

[BlueBerry]

I would agree with you that Nitrogen should be gone by now from 2 or 3 summers ago.
Are there other things like over crowding, or over watering?
So, a soil test maybe?
Or just wait and it will solve itself if too much Nitrogen were the problem.

[Robert]

I agree. Let it go. You could have burned the roots and they have spent time repairing the plants. Kind of a long time though. Have you tried cutting some of them down to see if they respond different? If they were fruiting well before they will again.

[steveb4]

i cut them to the ground in early spring and i prune out the shoots pretty hard till mid summer. some of those canes get 7ft. long and near 3/4in. dia. which is huge for these varieties. normally 5ft. max. lots of big leaves too. to make things worse, it was a bloom chemical fertilizer i got on clearence and it was pretty potent. stupid move on my part. this years severe drought didnt help any to dilute it at all. thanks for the advice. ill give them more time.

[Carlin]

Could always till in a little bit of sawdust/woodchips to temporarily drop the N…would have been more beneficial earlier on and may overly slow thing down so id do a couple sections along the row and see if it helps…extra large size/leaves still points to excess N

[MikeC]

I did the exactly the same thing. I fertilized my black raspberries two years ago. I had never fertilized them before and they always done great before. I thought I would give them a little extra boost of nutrients so they would continue to produce great black raspberries. They did very poorly that year and of course we had a huge cold weather snap around the time they were going to bloom, into the mid 20’s. I am not going to do that again. I will let them go natural and see what happens in the next couple of years.

[Boizeau]

Find a cover crop that takes a lot of Nitrogen.
Any field Corn would work.
Of course it will shade the raspberries eventually but you can cut it down at 3-4 feet.

[RichardRoundTree]

I really would think that all that excess nitrogen would be fully cycled by now, what else did you fertilize them with ?

Remember when we were talking about my blackberry issues and you told me to leave my blackberries alone and stop fertilizing them, at first it seemed like they died but then like 4 of them sprang back to life however they have all now totally reverted and are all thorned but in the same locations i put thornless blackberries (I didn’t plant any thorned varieties on that side however i accidentally ordered a prime ark 45 but i put it a good 200’ away). Im probably going to rip them out and replace with honeyberries as i still cannot seem to overwinter the canes without a tremendous amount of effort but they get one last year.

Probably a soil test is your best bet