Raised beds for Raspberries

Hello, I am building a raised bed for raspberries that should get here the week of April 9th. I bought them from Nourse Farms and am getting ready. I have few questions. The first one is how deep do I need to have the soil in my raised bed? I have really bad clay soil and I have read that raspberries don't like wet feet. Well, the soil in the place I am building the bed gets quite wet. (Doesn't drain well) Right now I have a bed that is 8" deep but could go deeper if I need to. How deep do the raspberry roots get after they are established? I have read that you only need to plant them 2-3" deep for bare root when you get them. I just don't want to go through all of this work and find out that I didn't make my bed deep enough. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!!

Here is a picture to help you understand what I am doing.(a picture is worth a thousand words) I am using cinderblocks and putting in a good soil mix once the bed is completed. The funny pipe you see will be a drip system that I will put in to water the raspberries.

Lissy

No one has any advice for raspberries in a raised bed? DANG! I really need some advice before I make up my mind. ANYONE????

"Raspberries are shallow rooted with most of their root system in the top 10 inches of soil" from http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/ag569.html

I'd say you're fine as long as water can drain out of the low spot of that bed. I can see what looks like crushed gravel under the cinder blocks so it should drain ok.

Can you till up the grass before you fill the bed? That would help some. If not, how about covering it with 5-6 sheets deep of wet newspaper? Would kill the grass and add to your organic matter. from what I've read, raspberries like the soil as rich as you can get it.

I planted my raspberries this winter in a raised bed 4-6" high on heavy clay.

Jeff

I was pulling up some old berries recently and most of the roots were in the upper 5". You should be find with the bed you have.

I wouldn't bother messing with the grass, it will be all composted in a few years when the roots of the berries get down that far.

Scott

Thanks for asking this question! I was going to ask basically the same thing. Gotta love that clay soil and that high groundwater...

Which soil mix are you planning on using to fill the beds?

THANK YOU ALL for your responses. I appreciate it so much.

Jekehl and PatriciaS~ that is exactly what I am going to do with the grass. I am going to put down some newspaper and layer my bed with lots of oraganic matter. I am going to do the lasagna garden method where you layer different materials. I have lots of Peat moss, shredded leaves, alfalfa pellets, finished compost, kitchen scraps and grass clippings. (have been collecting from the neighborhood) The worms are going to find this garden spot and think they died and went to worm heaven. LOL I also have sand and pea gravel in the bottom of the cinder blocks to help drain water out of the bed. I was just worried that the soil would still get saturated by how wet this part of my yard gets. After much thought on this subject of raspberries in this location I decided to double up my bed . I am hoping the added depth will also help with the dranage problem of this area. I just barely got done doing that tonight and my poor back and legs are screaming right now. What a job!! WHEW!!

scottfsmith~ I am glad to hear that the roots were only in the upper 5" of soil. With the added depth of this bed, I am sure that the water will not saturate that far up. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this will work!

I will have to post some pictures of the whole project when it is finished. After I get the soil put in this Saturday, I am going to construct a trellis. I just love projects like this. My DH thinks I am nuts! LOL

I'd say you'll have very happy raspberries for years to come after you get done with your layers. Brambles are built to run around horizontally so don't plant them too close together. What cultivar did you get? Theoretically if you got an everbearing type like Heritage you could have berries this fall. The plants have to establish their roots first, then send out new growth. The traditional type would bear on this primocane (1 year old cane) next spring but everbearing will bare fruit this fall.

"my poor back and legs are screaming right now"
When I'm feeling this way and, it's almost every other day during spring planting, I remind myself that I use to pay Bally's or some other gym $30/month to feel this way. And they charged me for the fruit in my smoothie afterwards...

Please do post pics so we can see how they do.

Jeff

Jeff~ I am going to plant mostly Caroline Raspberries. Nourse farms says that this variety is an everbearer red raspberry. I chose this one because it said in the description that it is more tolerant of root rot and it is very productive. I am also going to put in a few Jaclyn raspberries just to try them out. Jaclyn is also an everbearer red raspberry. I sure hope I picked some good ones. I love to grow tomatoes also, and you can never go off of the discriptions in catalogs. Sometimes they say it is the "BEST" tomato you will ever eat; you buy it to only find out it tastes like cardboard. LOL I am sure it is probably true with raspberries.

You have a good point about the gym membership. I like that!! I need to look at this project as my workout for the day that is "free" except for the cost of materials. LOL I will for sure post pics when I am finished with planting.

Caroline is a great berry, you can't go wrong with that one.

One last thing to keep in mind is to make sure to keep the number of canes from getting out of hand in future years. I wasn't paying much attention to that and my Heritage bed had gotten wider and wider and more and more dense with canes, and last summer I ended up with these midget-sized raspberries as a result. You want to have the canes something like one cane per 5" of row. So a 25' row would have 25*12/5=60 canes total in it, no more.

Scott

It's reassuring to read that the Caroline raspberries I just planted are good ones. This is my first stab at raspberries - and I put six of them in a raised bed on the south side of my house. Hope they do better than my blackberries! I planted them two years ago. Don't remember what time of year. But last year they did absolutely nothing - 3 of 6 didn't even survive. Since blackberries grow wild around here, I'm really clueless as to what the problem was. This year there is one cane on each plant that looks healthy - so we'll see how it goes.

Raspberries may find it a bit hot down there in Texas. They're not supposed to like the heat here in Georgia very much either :( But I planted them anyway. So far, the blackberries I have planted have all leafed out and seem happy but the raspberries have not woken up yet. What sort of soil did you plant the blackberries in?

Is it possible to grow raspberries in containers? The raised bed approach is making me think containers might work. But how large a container?

I grew mine in the clay soil in Asheville, just mulched around them to keep weeds down. They did great.

Here is an update of my raised bed for my raspberries. I can't wait to plant them now. I get them on April 13th , I hope. Anywhoo, I started with the lasagna garden soil and didn't have enough to fill to the depth that I wanted. I went to a local garden shop and got a soil mix that had nutrimulch in it. It seemed like really good stuff so I put a small layer on top of my lasagna garden mix. I only put about 2-3 inches of the soil on top so I hope that the lasagna garden layers will still help my raspberries out.

Wow, looks great Lissy! My beds tend to be very crooked and haphazard because I use pine trees to build them wherever there is room. Yours looks professionally done. I wouldn't worry about the lasagna layers breaking down. I usually dump all the pine needles and leaves from the forest floor onto the bottom of the bed when I start and then put dirt on top. When I dig into the layers a couple months later it's blackened and breaking down.

What kind of mulch if any are you going to use?

Jeff

Jeff, sorry it took me so long to respond. My family and I just got back from fishing for steelhead in Idaho. We had a blast. Now about your question. I have not even thought about what I am going to use for mulch. I have been so caught up in getting the soil ready that I haven't given it much thought. My raspberries should come this Friday!!! WHOO HOO!! I guess I better start thinking about it. What would you suggest? I have a lot of shredded leaves that I was going to use for my compost piles. Would that work or would it pull too much nitrogen out of the soil? Maybe I could just use finished compost. Any ideas?

Anything organic would work ok, so a lot depnds on how you want it to look and how you want to maintain it. Leaves, straw, wood chips are all high in carbon so as you said you'd need to make sure to add extra nitrogen to compensate for that. Finished compost would be great for them I'm sure, would add plenty of nutrients. Might be a few more weeds if you've got seeds in it.

You could get away with no mulch if you wanted. Probably not a ton of weeds with that high of a bed and you could hand pull them. I like mulch though whenever I can because it keeps the soil moist consistently and adds food as it breaks down.

The other thing with mulch is, if you're wanting to raise or lower the soil temp a few degrees you can do it with the color of the mulch. Something light like straw reflects sunlight and keeps the soil cooler. Dark like compost will warm it up.

Jeff

Maybe I will do a layer of shredded leaves with a touch of alfalfa pellets. I have a ton of leaves I collected from Fall. Thanks for the tips. I appreciate it. That means I need more leaves for my compost piles!! I better go searching.

I have to tell a funny story on myself. Recently I got a couple of raspberry plants, and I had a good spot near the fence. Well, I planted them with no difficulty. HOWEVER, I had not remembered that I planted dormant hostas in there last fall. I now have a raspberry smack dab in the center of an emerging hosta!

Hostas make great mulch too lol!

RE: Raspberries in clay soil--My neighbor planted one red raspberry cane in her back yard years ago, and now she has canes that have taken over a significant part of her lawn! We have heavy clay, and even though she did nothing to the lawn they have thrived beyond her expectations. This is a confirmation of the previous posts that raspberries do all right in clay soil. Of course, your amended soil/lasagna would be even better.

RE: Caroline raspberries: I received canes last year and planted them in a 3x6 foot raised bed 10" high, filled with purchased soil mix. (The bed consisted of two Gardeners Supply grow beds end to end.) The plants gave a nice little crop at the end of the first season! This year they leafed out again and many new little canes are starting. As ScottfSmith said, Caroline is a good choice!

I chose a fall (ever-?) bearing variety because I wanted to be able to cut down all the canes every year and not have to determine which to prune. But, since even the oldest are all second year canes I let them stay. After this season they'll all be cut down.

RE: happy_macomb's question about raspberries in containers - In the book "Container Gardening" by Anthony Atha, the author says, "do not try to grow raspberries, because they need to spread." I think that it means you could grow it one year maybe, but the runners sent out a distance from the original plant wouldn't have anywhere to go.



This message was edited Apr 11, 2008 3:50 PM

I just got some Caroline raspberries from Nourse. Absolutely beautiful plants. The roots were close to two feet long!! Be prepared.

katiebear

Great! I have some "Caroline" coming from Nourse also...