It’s too bad that I don’t have a photo of it — forgot — but it’s red raspberry season now and for the first time Henry pitched in and helped with the weeding and the picking and he set up a roadside stand and made $20 all told. But he’s about done with berries now. 20 minutes a day was a BIT too much.
Well, it didn’t help that someone stole 3 pints of berries from his stand.
We’ve only been getting about 3 pints a day. But he was selling them for $3/pint.
Now I’m doing the picking and we’re just freezing them.
I expanded the effective berries about 25% over last year, but I actually doubled the planted rows. It’s just that I did the harsh total pruning (a pruning option for everbearing varieties) on my transplants as well as my established berries and their new canes came back very weakly.
To make pruning easy for everbearing berries, you can just chop everything down to the ground in the spring after the first thaw. You miss your first crop as a result but you get a double-size second, fall crop. Then you just have to hope they don’t get frozen out too soon. But berries are hardy so you should be OK.
Next year I’ll expand them even more and we really should have a viable commercial crop for the kids to experience.
I like berries because of how tasty they are. And how well they grow here. And they’re interesting to pick and care for — all the bee people love them, too, but they just hum, never sting. Lastly, it’s very hard for agribusiness to compete with a good local berry grower. Locals always taste twice as good — it’s a handy edge to have. And they aren’t the commonest crop. So a roadside berry stand does all right.
You do have to beware the Japanese beetles — we put out a trap with a long-lasting bait and had no troubles this year.
…And the snails — cups of beer set into the ground stop them.
…And the gray mold. Cool, wet weather PLUS lack of air circulation plus any lack of “picking clean” the ripe berries will leave hidden overripe hand-grenade berries and you’ll nuke your crop in a matter of a day or two. I went afoul on the gray mold this year but thankfully rescued the crop just in time. I didn’t always follow up on Henry’s picking and I believe he left a lot of berries that rotted and molded which then rapidly spread. One more day and it would’ve been all gone. But I went thru and picked and cut out all the moldy berries and clusters and they seem clean now. I also didn’t thin my canes enough or trellis them upright enough. Our garden is in the woods where we don’t get much breeze as it is, so I need to be careful. Thinning and trellising is fun so I look forward to doing it right next season. Happy berries are so rewarding. For my trellises I’ll just pound sapling posts at the ends and middles of my rows and string wire back and forth pinning the growing canes upright. This year I set them up too low and my thick canes did a lot of drooping over and smothering, which makes picking hard and makes molding easy.
We just got our first frost yesterday. Several hours of hard 30F. The berries I picked last night were fine but we’ll see what happens. I googled that light-red unripe berries will ripen more slowly now and green ones might not ripen. We’ll see.
