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Should my raspberry canes be growing?
Emma41
Posts: 33
in Fruit & veg
I planted 5 bare root canes of Polka and 5 of Tulameen in large pots last year in late autumn as a temporary measure until my raised fruit and veg bed was built.
In march I had the raised bed finished so planted them on. 2 Tulameen had new growth from the bottom (not off the cane) and 1 of the Polka had the same. All looked to have grown new roots and looked healthy.
Since then......nothing more. The rest of the canes are still just brown sticks! The new growth on the 3 canes hasn't grown any further either. Should I expect more new growth by now? I'm worried they're not going to grow and I'll have to plant new ones and be waiting till 2018 for fruit now instead of 2017 :-( what am I doing wrong?
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Posts
My Polka are growing away well now, but they have been where they are for a few years now. I would gently scrape some soil away from around the brown stick ones and just see if there's any sign of new shoots underground.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
If there are signs of shoots, would that indicate I planted them too deep (I don't think I did, just a couple inches), or that moving them just checked their growth a bit? I'll have a careful dig around the base this weekend and see what I find.
Out of 10 canes planted at the start of the year, 7 are shooting, the others are dead, or slow. Out of 5 last year, only two survived. All have shooted from the soil, not from the cane itself which dies. Aldi frozen raspberries are cheap and good.
An update on this one. Dug them up to see what was happening underground - if anything. Two of the Tulameen were just dead sticks, one other still had roots but no new shoots, and two have their stunted shoots. The Polka were four dead sticks and just the one with a tiny stunted shoot on it. So all in all, a complete disaster!! Luckily I managed to get some Tulameen canes from The Range which will hopefully survive. But the Polka are a write off this year. Have to try again when the shops get them in at the end of the year.So annoyed that I went to so much effort with them when I might as well have shoved a bunch of twigs in the soil. I'll be going back to the garden centre with my twigs and demanding my money back but nothing makes up for being a year behind with the fruit I really wanted :-(