Gardening season is looming and we are all champing at the bit I'm sure. And while the evenings and even the days for that matter are far too cold yet to actually put stuff out even if you are living on the west coast of Canada it is a good time to make some plans and come up with ideas. The gardening magazines are beginning to appear at the checkout in supermarkets and they are a great source for ideas and products. I used to buy those all the time because the photos were so darn appealing. Made you want to run out and dig something up and move it. Don used to joke that my plants, including trees, should be on wheels because I moved things so often.
Last year, I became aware of an issue in my own garden, something that I was going to change in the spring. And if I'd stayed here, where we are living now, I would be making the necessary adjustments, but we're moving in a month and when I do a new garden this is definitely going to be factored in. When we first moved here, I dug up an area of meadow behind the house and this was my garden. And on the one end of it, I included a row of raspberries. The first year they were slow and only setting in roots. What I didn't realize is that raspberries spread by underground runners and in their second year, I was finding raspberries all over the row next to theirs. I'm sure that if they are left there, they will spread even further and it will become an ongoing nuisance. Raspberries growing in the asparagus bed and the carrots and everywhere else. If I were staying here, I'd be taking them out and resettling them.
At this point, here's my take on raspberries in the home garden. Take up the sod in a long row and make it 18 to 24 inches wide. I would use landscape ties or something like that to edge the bed, or perhaps that plastic lawn edging stuff that keeps the grass from growing into your raspberry planting. Add enough soil that the surface is once again level with whatever you've edged it with. At each end of your row set in a couple of posts and in the middle too if the row is long enough to need additional support there for the wires that you will attach your canes to as the plants grow. I would set my plants in at whatever distance apart the package tells you too, and then cover the top of the soil with sawdust or some kind of mulch to keep the soil moist underneath. Once your new or recently moved plants have had time to settle in again, they will do what comes naturally which is to send suckers out all over the place. The only difference now is that when you mow your lawn up and down the sides of your row, you will trim them off and they won't be going where you don't want them. This effectively restricts them to their own place. A lot easier than spending the summer trying to dig the silly things out of the other veggies without causing havoc and mayhem in the rest of the garden.
Hope this helps as you plot and plan and good luck with the weather, the only thing we have no control over.
