David Handley, Vegetable/Small Fruit Specialist: "I'm David Handley, vegetable and small fruits
specialist for UMaine's Cooperative Extension, and we're here to talk about the basics of
growing raspberries, or how this plant works. We'll take a look at the different parts of
the plant and what you can expect in terms of how to grow it and when it will fruit for
you.
"The above ground parts of the raspberry plant--the canes--arebiennial. They live for two years.
The first year they come up from buds on the ground, and we call these first-year canes
primocanes. It's a green shoot coming right up from the ground, and these will grow to
a fairly good height depending on what variety you're growing, anywhere from 4 to 7 feet
tall.
"As these canes grow, every place a leaf meets the stem, it forms a little bud we call axillary
buds. These buds stay on the cane through the first growing season and remain as buds--they'll
stay dormant, and if we have a relatively mild winter, it should come through that winter
"This green skin will turn into a brown bark, and in the second year of its life we call
it a floricane. It's got brown, peeling bark on it. It's also got little shoots on it,
and we call these shooting fruits or shooting laterals. These came from those axillary buds
that were formed on the primocane.
"In the second year, when the spring comes along and these canes start to grow again,
these little buds break and give us little sideshoots with what we call fruiting laterals,
and this is where the fruit is going to be born. These will have flowers and little green
fruit on them, and in a few weeks we'll be picking some nice red raspberries off these
"After the fruit ripens and we've started harvesting, you'll notice these leaves start
to turn reddish and yellow, and eventually this cane will die in the late summer or early
fall. That's the end of the life for that cane, and next year's crop is coming from
this year's group of primocanes.
"The exception to the rule is ever-bearing raspberries. The ever-bearing raspberries
will form a crop in the late spring or early summertime, and they'll have a second crop
in the fall. How they work is that the first-year canes come up just like we saw with the regular
varieties of raspberry, and they form buds in the leaf axils.
"But the buds at the top of the crown don't grow dormant. They don't wait for the wintertime;
they start to fruit right away, and that's where your fall crop comes from. So, your
fall crop is on those first-year canes or those primocanes. That's why ever-bearing
raspberries are also known as primocane fruiting raspberries.
"The buds lower down on the cane will remain dormant, just like a regular raspberry, and
those will give you a regular summer crop the following year. So, on ever-bearing raspberries,
you get a regular summer crop on the buds low down on the cane, but you'll also get
a fall crop on your primocanes on the buds at the top of the cane.
"In some 2-year-old canes, here's last year's crop. And here's this year's crop coming on.
So, here are our fruiting laterals, with our buds and our flowers, getting ready to give
us a summer crop. This is last year's crop on the 2-year cane, so our summer crop and
this year's fall crop are going to be coming from these primocanes right here."