I planted a collection of raspberries but forgot to separate summer- from autumn-fruiting canes. Should I just treat them all the same and not worry?
Don’t cut anything back now: spend the summer picking through the plants. Once you’ve got your eye in, it’s easy: summer types fruit on two-year-old, pale brown canes in July and August. By the time they fruit, you should have new canes growing up around them, which will be next year’s crop. Once the old canes are finished, cut them back to allow space for the new ones.
And the autumn canes? If you don’t prune autumn-fruiting raspberries to the ground in spring, you get double cropping: older canes fruit roughly at the same time as the summer-fruiting crop. However, autumn-fruiting canes that double crop are never as prolific as summer-fruiting ones, and the new canes that appear around them will go on to fruit in autumn. The summer-fruiting new canes won’t do this. In other words, if you find a patch where you picked fruit in July and August, and again in September and October, you can bet these are autumn canes. Label these and in early winter dig them up and sort into their respective categories.
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