- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Is Peer Review Broken?7 years ago in Angry by Choice
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
Citizen Science Works!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Annual Berry Bramble Battle
One of the annual March chores is doing battle with the raspberry bramble. The reason for this is simple: the aerial shoots (canes) of red raspberries have a biennial cycle. In their first year new canes remain vegetative and unbranched, growing into long whips and over wintering in this condition. In their second year, raspberry canes branch, flower, and fruit, and then these shoots die as the season ends. This means you have to do two things each spring: one, remove all of last year’s dead canes, and two, cut all of the year-old canes back to about two feet tall to promote branching, flowering, and fruiting, and less flopping of fruit laden canes. This means you have to make sure you can tell the difference between live one-year-old canes and dead two-year-old canes; this sounds easy, but people screw up easier things than this. Every time you make a mistake, you shoot yourself in the berry basket. All of this is made more fun because the canes tend to tangle together and they’re armed with prickles (yes, this is a technical term for smallish thorns). Now these prickles are nothing compared to the thorns on climbing roses, and those are nothing compared to climbing rattan palms, but the joy and the bleeding are there. Other than this red raspberries are a pretty carefree, reliable, bountiful, and delicious crop, except of course once you realize you must establish a de-militarized zone, preferably a mine field or retired star wars laser cannons, where any entering raspberries get vaporized. Or as an alternative to bramble warfare, let them spread into the neighbors’ yard.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Oh my, that sounds like quite the chore! I think I'll stick to buying them at the store!
It only takes 2-3 hrs, but at the prices you would pay in a store, my bramble yields $150-$200 of berries. And we won't talk about the qualitative differences.
Post a Comment