When we were up in NY a week and a half ago, I was shocked to see how loaded with buds my dad's
raspberries were! I mean - LOADED! His plants looked super healthy, the leaves were a nice healthy green, and the tops of them were covered with flower buds that would be forming raspberries very soon.
I'm jealous!
Granted, dad's yard/garden has had many more years of development/improvement - their grass is greener, their soil is of better quality, he's been amending all his garden space for years now. So he's much farther ahead of me.
Image by jephremley via Flickr
My raspberry canes look lush - they're tall with lots of leafy growth. But those leaves could maybe be a bit greener, and they're chewed up by Japanese beetles, and I'm really not seeing many raspberries on them yet. I have two varieties - Anne, which is a large pale golden raspberry, and Heritage (the same variety my dad grows) which are a more standard, smaller red variety. My Anne raspberries have already been producing for a couple weeks now, but I only ever find 2-3 raspberries at any one time that are ripe and ready to eat. I've seen a few red Heritage raspberries here and there, but the Japanese beetles really seem attracted to them.
Oh, and then there's all the rain we're getting right now - that's actually causing a lot of the raspberries to mold before they're even fully grown. Trust me - moldy raspberries are pretty gross.
Image by jephremley via Flickr
Hopefully things will dry out for a little bit and perhaps my plants will start budding out more and forming more fruit. Oooor, maybe because I just planted them last year, they're just not going to do much this year. We'll have to wait and see!
No comments:
Post a Comment