[geeks] Greenery and brambles...

[Mike Hebel]

Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Monday, October 28, 2002 at 10:04:40 (-0500), Chris Hedemark wrote: ]
> 
>>Subject: Re: [geeks] Greenery and brambles...
>>
>>Or plant them tightly in four foot wide rows, as from either side of 
>>the row it isn't hard to reach in two feet.
> 
> 
> I picked raspberries all my pre-adult life in a quite large patch on our
> farm in Sask. and from that experience I wouldn't want to work with rows
> any more than two feet wide at the base.  It's hard enough to reach
> through up to your elbow sometimes, even with a leather jacket on, but
> the real problem is in finding all the fruit before it drops.  It takes
> significantly more time, effort, and experience when you've got to find
> it almost by touch.

I can second this one.  When I was much younger the best method we found 
  was to have one person lay on their back and look up into the bush 
with a flashlight and the other to "follow the bouncing ball" and pick 
the berries.

> There's also the issue of maintaining the rows too -- weeds and grass
> creep in and getting them out without damaging the plants is difficult,
> and of course the old canes need to be removed, carefully, every fall
> too.

Any sort of long grass seems to like the underspace of these IMHO.  I 
don't know the name of the grass in question but it was striped 
vertically and almost choked the bushes one year.

Canes?  Are we still talking about raspberries? Could you please clarify?

> I really wish I had a plot of raspberries here.  However with this heavy
> clay muck we have here I'd realy need a roto-tiller (or another five
> years of ammending), before I could maintain a patch big enough to be
> worthwhile (or to win a lottery so that I could spend more time in the
> garden in the summer months than I do in front of the computer :-).
> Unfortunately a roto-tiller heavy-duty-enough to handle this muck will
> likely also be so wide as to eat up too much valuable space between the
> rows.  We have a big back-yard, but it's not that big!  ;-)

Hmmm...we tilled the clayish soil here and it didn't help all that much. 
  So far the best seems to just be adding enough topsoil to not change 
your drainage all that much and plant on top of that.  Each area is 
different though.

Mike Hebel