While I was  growing up, the lady who lived next door to us grew raspberries in the back of her small city yard. We were often invited over to pick what we wanted, and those berries always seemed like an essential part of summer. After our elderly neighbor died, a young family bought her house, and one of the first things they did was to get rid of the raspberries — to their mind, those berry bushes were just an unsightly, thorny thicket that took valuable play-space away from their children.

Berries like raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries are known as “bramble” fruits because of their tendency to colonize into tangled thickets. For the home grower, however, raspberries are more easily managed and will produce more fruit if they’re grown in rows against some sort of support, usually a simple structure of posts with a few rows of heavy gauge wired stretched in between. The technique is often called “trellising.”

The first step toward managing raspberries on a trellis system is understanding a few basic facts about how raspberries grow:

  • Though the roots of the bushes are perennial, each stem — called a cane — is biennial, meaning it completes its fruiting cycle over a two-year period.
  • As new canes emerge from the ground in spring, these first year canes are called primocanes. Remember that these will grow taller and leaf out, but will not bear fruit during their first season.
  • With a trellising system, you’ll allow the primocanes to grow freely during the summer. They’ll naturally arch away from the trellis structure behind them.
  • At the end of this first growing season (anytime from fall through late winter or early spring), you’ll tie these canes to the trellis. When they leaf out again in spring, they’ll be second year canes, of floricanes. These are the ones that will now flower and produce berries. Because they’re tied upright to the trellis, you can easily distinguish them from the new primocanes that emerge.
  • Once you’ve harvested the berries from the second year canes and their fruiting season is over, you’ll cut them off at the base — they will not fruit again.
  • Then tie the remaining canes, the primocanes that have yet to bear fruit, to the trellis and let the cycle continue.

The Agricultural Extension Service of the University of Tennessee has an excellent publication that describes the process in more detail, with diagrams. You can download it for free.

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