It was a scene from a horror movie: a pool of bright red gore covering a third of the bed, and soaking my clothes; blood-red footprints through the house; red handprints across doors and walls. Small blobs of what looked like wobbly red intestines littered the floor.
Melted frozen raspberries. I'd been using a packet of last season's frozen surplus raspberries as a cold pack, so successfully that I had forgotten they were there. The raspberries melted. The bag leaked. I saw a puddle of red spreading around me, screamed and leapt to my feet, scattering soggy raspberries over the room. Cleaning up was... messy.
Do not freeze your surplus raspberries. Eat them fresh from the canes, popped into your mouth like lollies, or served fresh with thick cream, a good vanilla ice-cream or yoghurt, scattered on a virtuous plate of porridge, or the ultimate in raspberry decadence, lavishly added to the whipped cream on top and between the layers of a fresh sponge cake, the kind made with backyard chook or duck eggs.
Freezing surplus raspberries is only recommended if you'll be without any other kind of freshly picked fruit till next season. Never use them as a cold pack.
First you need to plant your raspberries. Luckily this is the perfect time of year to plant dormant canes. Find a spot where they'll get full sun in the morning, but not too much exposed heat in the afternoons. And that is about all I can tell from my own experience of growing conventional raspberries, because our valley is too shady for them to grow well.
Thankfully friends grow masses of them without much effort. There are dozens of raspberry varieties available from specialist nurseries. Some bear in early spring, some in autumn, some in both spring and autumn. Plant as many sorts as you can get hold of, so you have a continuous supply instead of a glut you are tempted to freeze. Old-fashioned Skeena, Chilcotin and Heritage will give you spring, summer and autumn fruit, but there are many other varieties you can try.
Always stake your raspberries, otherwise they'll collapse all over the place. The best raspberry grower I know just ties hers up to star pickets with old pantyhose. Neat-minded raspberry growers plant canes about 30cm apart on a wire trellis or fence. I've read about neat raspberry growers, but have never seen their gardens. My friends tend to be more "plant it and let's see how it grows".
Pruning raspberries is necessary, and sounds complicated, as summer-fruiting raspberries fruit on last year's wood, whereas autumn-flowering raspberries fruit on new growth. Actually all you really need to do is cut every cane back to the ground after it has fruited. They will liberally grow more canes for next year's crop.
Mulch your raspberries, and replace the mulch whenever it thins out. This will not only help feed the plants, but keep in moisture and keep down weeds - raspberry plants are horrible, prickly things to have to weed around.
The real trick with raspberries is to feed them generously with lots of fertiliser and mulch so you get berry after berry after berry. The next trick is to pick them early every morning, so the birds don't get to know you have ripe raspberries. Plant them, feed them, pick and eat them, then cut them to the ground. Simple.
MORE JACKIE FRENCH:
The raspberries we do grow extremely successfully are native raspberries that hail from North Queensland. Atherton raspberries (Rubus probus) are a supposedly tropical and subtropical raspberry. The bushes die back towards the end of our cold winters, but then happily grow back again in spring so I never need to prune them. The canes grow in full sun or semi shade and any soil type; survive severe drought; and keep fruiting for years even if you forget to feed them. Unlike European raspberries, they give you a few ripe fruit almost every day from early spring to mid-winter, with no massive seasonal crop. They also put out plentiful new canes, so I need to keep giving plants away. I bought mine online, but local nurseries might stock them. You only need one or two canes, as they multiply so quickly.
This summer I will give away any surplus raspberries as well as Atherton raspberry canes, assuming there's enough rain for a good crop. I hereby vow that from now on the surplus will never be frozen, so our household never has to face a raspberry chainsaw massacre again.
