Can everbearing red raspberries handle deer damage?
I've been moving our
initial plantings behind the deer fence bit by bit all year long. But
it took me a while to make up my mind about whether or not to
transplant the everbearing raspberries that line the path leading up to
our back door.
On the one hand, the
deer do eat them. Thorns mean the
raspberries aren't crunched all the way down the ground the way other
unprotected plantings are. But the image above is pretty typical, and
the bushes produced about half as much as they would have if they
hadn't been nipped.
On the other hand, it's
nice being greeted with tasty berries every time I get out of the car.
(Well, nice for me. Mark probably doesn't like it as much because it
means fewer berries make it inside to land on his plate.)
In the end, I decided to
split the difference. I left the existing bed in place, figuring it was
minimal work to weed, topdress, and mulch the area a couple of times a
year. Then I transplanted excess shoots into the main garden where they
can be safe from hooved marauders.
Of course, now I'll have
no excuse for failing to share the harvest. Do you think Mark will buy
it if I say I dropped the bowl of berries on the way into the house?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I know that I get a lot more raspberries when my daughter is off at college and my wife is picking them. Even worse--for years, I didn't think our strawberries were really producing much at all.
Now she has her own garden bed at the house she is renting for the year! It is wonderful to see your passions being handed down to another generation.