Slip them into a smoothie or make them into jam: raspberries are one of the delights of summer. My favorite way to eat raspberries is to pick them and eat them straight from the bush on a warm summer’s day.
Why Eat Raspberries?
Raspberries are a lower-carbohydrate fruit. They’re also high in fiber. All of those tiny seeds are good for something! One cup of raspberries contains more than half of your daily requirement for Vitamin C. Raspberries are also packed full of ellagic acid, a substance that helps with antioxidant activity. Even raspberry leaves are beneficial in teas. In short, raspberries are good for you. Of course, they’re also delicious, and that’s what’s most important!
How to Grow Raspberries
How do you grow raspberries? Luckily, these little beauties are quite simple to grow. I’d recommend getting a plant from a nursery or from a friend. Raspberry bushes often grow new baby plants, and your friends and neighbors may be looking for someone who’d like to adopt them.
Plant your raspberries in a dry, sunny spot in the garden, and they will thrive. If you’re feeling ambitious and would love to have an entire row of these plants, let your row grow itself. Over the course of a year or two, let the perennial, self-propagating raspberries do their work, and soon you too will have an entire row with very little expense!
If you live in a damp place or your spring is cool, raspberries can be prone to various fungal diseases such as rust. These diseases start on the leaves and look like yellow or orange spots or dust. To prevent your raspberries from getting rust fungus, make sure that you plant them in a place with lots of sunshine and good airflow. Avoid areas where water tends to pool and splash onto the plants.
Choosing Your Raspberries
Raspberries are often red, but there are other varieties as well. You can choose from different colored raspberries in yellow, purple, and black.
The most important choice that you need to make is to decide your fruiting season. What sort of raspberry-grower are you? If you like your raspberries all at once for jam, choose an early, summer, or fall-bearing variety. If you love a few berries on your cereal or in a fruit salad, go for an everbearing variety. These slow but steady producers bear fruit for months on end, often until the first frost. One year, I harvested a raspberry on December 1st!
Of course, if you have the space you can certainly mix and match your varieties. Raspberries are self-fertile, which means that you can plant a single raspberry bush of a specific type and still get fruit. Plant early, summer, and fall varieties and you could be wallowing in berries all season!
Love raspberries? Share your raspberry recipes below! Mine’s simple: it’s a basic raspberry and sugar freezer jam that doesn’t involve cooking, so it keeps that lovely fresh raspberry taste.
