When we first bought this house, and I had a real garden, I knew I wanted to grow raspberries. One of my favourite childhood memories is visiting my grandparents’ raspberry patch. Although I know that raspberry season lasts only a short time, in my memory there were always raspberries at my grandma and grandpa’s house. Clearly, these little bites of summer loom large in my memory.
The first of the ripe raspberries
As soon as I had a garden of my own, and a spot cleared out, I hied myself to the garden store in search of raspberries. I picked up the last two spindly canes they had and planted them. It was a long wait for spring that year, let me tell you.
I pick the berries
In the past six years we have gone from two scrawny canes to many massive, bushy raspberry plants. I love them because they are very hardy. They survive my neglect, year after year after year. Even more than that, they thrive and produce amazing yields of delicious berries.
Hannah lines them all up in a row
My daughter Hannah loves raspberries, they are her very most favourite berries. If I want any for myself I have to eat them behind her back. She claims them as her own, and only shares if she is made to. Heading into the garden to search for ripe raspberries is a highlight of her summer days.
Eating the berries
I imagine that Hannah will remember raspberry season fondly. That it will loom large in her memory as it does in mine. And that, should Hannah ever buy a house, she will make a pilgrimage to the garden store for raspberries of her own. Because they’re her favourite thing in the garden.
Love the photos and the memories it brings up for me, too. My dear dad had a green thumb. We had a huge garden and I , too, went out to pick the raspberries and strawberries every morning. I'm sure Hannah will remember her berries and her amazing mother, who made so many things possible.
Raspberries here are still a while off. Ours are ripe beginning in August and until the first hard frost. I don’t expect to get any on my plants this year, since I just planted them in March, but I planted red, black, white, and purple. I love raspberries, too!
I absolutely love raspberries. We had a neighbour a few houses down that had a raspberry bush planted near the fence that separated his yard with the alley. When I was a kid I always used to squeeze my hand through his fence to steel whichever raspberries I could reach.
Your raspberries look delicious. And your daughter Hannah looks happy when she eat them. I wish I have garden to plant them like you.
I so want to go out and buy raspberries right now. I love your camera. It takes awesome quality pictures.
Mmmmm…..Your rasberries look SO good!
Good pictures – mouthwatering!
I never understand when people complain that raspberry canes take over and are impossible to keep in check — I say the more raspberries the better. My parents have them and are only a five-minute walk away, and my kids love going over there and picking the bushes clean in the summer. There’s something so soul-feeding in picking something you’ve grown and eating it right off the bush, still warm from the sun.
I love raspberries, but aren’t the plants really prickly? I remember picking raspberries from the wild bushes in the back of my high school and my legs got completely covered with scratches.
Maybe they have some new plants these days that they’ve managed to breed without thorns. I think I want one!
The colors of your raspberries in your photo look delicious!!
We also enjoy the fruits in our yard and of those we find growing wild in the woods…
I am going to see if raspberries can be grown in our climate. I also have a lot of fond memories from my childhood, but I lived in a very different place then, and my memories are all of wild raspberry picking. Still – it would be so neat to have “an eatable” (a definition from my daughter) fruit in our backyard for a change.
Lovely photos…and memories! With my grandparents, it was the wild blueberries
Isn’t it wonderful how raspberry bushes put up with so much, require such little care, and produce such treasures…kind of like mothers