Some people say summer is all about strawberries but for me, when it comes to home-grown fruit, raspberries have them beaten hands down.
For starters, raspberries yield far more fruit per square metre, up to three times as much as strawbs in my tiny Croydon plot. They’re a real godsend for those with only a postage stamp-sized patch to play with. They are also far easier to grow. You get none of the hours of endless weeding all summer, the trimming of hundreds of scraggly runners on all fours, not to mention the replanting every three years or so. Instead, raspberries often simply require just a quick once-over with the secateurs each winter. Also, growing on canes means raspberries are out of reach of the armies of greedy slugs which can decimate a strawberry crop. Basically, they’re a pretty firm winner all round in the effort/reward stakes.
However, you can go one better. Plant an autumn-fruiting raspberry this year and get even better harvests for even less effort. Here’s how it works…
While summer raspberries offer up an explosive sprint of fruit all in one big go in July or August, autumn-fruiting varieties are the endurance athletes of the species, laying on a deliciously steady succession from late August right through till October. Instead of a month-long glut of berries that ripen so quickly that you barely have a chance to pick and eat them before they spoil, the autumn fruiters offer a continuous stream over three months, stretching the taste of summer right out until the first frosts.
For newbie growers you also won’t need to worry about complicated, time-consuming pruning rules when winter sets in. There’s none of this confusion about which canes to cut and which to leave, just whack the whole lot down to ground level with sharp secateurs in February and you are good to go. This same pruning technique means that plants are usually of a far more controllable size, so they can be planted in containers. This is great news for those with only patios or roof terraces to garden on.
Now for some variety ideas. Back in 2014 I conducted a massive tasting of dozens of varieties of raspberries at the RHS Wisley garden and my top three flavour heavyweights were autumn fruiters. ‘Joan J’ lived up to its reputation as one of the sweetest, most aromatic varieties, on mercifully spine-free plants. ‘Polka’ is as delicious as it is generous, with yields as much as double that of other cultivars. Finally ‘All Gold’, despite being often dismissed as a novelty variety because of its quirky yellow hue, has a spectacular sweetness and fragrance on super compact plants.
Can’t make up your mind? Go for one of each and thank me come harvest time.
Email James at james.wong@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @Botanygeek
