Kitchen Garden Forum

It is time to cut out the old canes of my summer fruiting raspberries, however, some of the new canes which I would have expected to leave for next year are already flowering and have embryo fruit. I am a loss as to whether to cut these canes out, cut off the flowers or what. If I cut out these canes, I will have very few left for next year. I live in Scotland, near Edinburgh, so we would expect some cold spells during the winter.

Mine are doing exactly the same, but i'm not going to worry about it too much, i'm just going to leave them an see what next year brings.

It's probably just to do with the weather this year, and i'm sure they will sort themselves out.

Ditto - Thanks for replying OH as I was getting confused as
to cut back or not. I guess we just leave nature to its own
devices at times.

Westi

I will just add, i do like to prune out the old canes as soon as they have finished fruiting.

I prune out the fruited shoots as soon as they have finsihed fruiting too

Where our allotments are (near Edinburgh), pruning out the fruited canes immediately after fruiting is a recipe for being eaten alive by berry bugs. I tend to wait until it is cooler but even today I was being eaten alive by midges - the Scottish scourge.
However, the old canes are now removed - but it is these new ones with fruit and flowers on them which are causing my worries as to how to treat them.

Dear pbrayne, i'm sure they will still multi-branch from the main stem next year, and it will be these branches that carry the fruit.

It's something raspberries do to a greater or lesser degree every year. It's nothing to worry about and you don't need to do anything about it.

Strangely I took the nets off and pruned my summer varieties about a month or so ago. Today I managed to pick enough perfectly ripe fruit.
There were enough to make a Raspberry Crumble for this evening.
What mystifies me is that although I have several pairs of Blackbirds on the plot they have made no attempt to take these late fruit yet earlier on in the season if I didn't employ nets I would, by now, have no fruit left to pick!
JB.

Dear Johnboy, i have noticed this too, especially with the second flush of strawberries. At the beggining of the strawberry harvest, i think every blackbird in Bedfordshire found it's way onto my plot.
I can only put this down to the abundance of natures harvest at this time of the year, and also not rearing young.

Johnboy wrote:What mystifies me is that although I have several pairs of Blackbirds on the plot they have made no attempt to take these late fruit yet earlier on in the season if I didn't employ nets I would, by now, have no fruit left to pick!
JB.

JB I have noticed the same thing with redcurrants - if we don't net them when they are ripening they will disappear (the birds sit on the posts chuntering and trying to get in even when I have the net up whilst picking) but once we have had our fill and remove netting the birds aren't interested. The autumn fruiting rasps and also the later flush of strawberries also are left. Maybe birds just like a challenge or maybe they are programmed to seek out red at a time when most ripe fruits are red. Or maybe their food requirements change with the seasons or ... or ...or

I've never netted raspberries wherever I have grown them. One or two will get pecked, is all, otherwise a massive harvest has always ensued. I think fruit cages and netting fruit is a major pain and a sure way to end up with thickets of difficult-to-control weeds around the fruit plot perimeter. Bird netting makes a nice support for bind weed.