How to grow raspberries and the best varieties

Summer-fruiting raspberries (floricane) produce canes every year. These new canes grow throughout the summer, go dormant in the winter and produce raspberries the following summer, before dying back. Autumn-fruiting raspberries (primocanes) produce new canes in the spring and fruit on them in the autumn of the same year. These canes can also produce fruit the following summer, so you can leave them standing for an earlier, albeit smaller, second crop.

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Best raspberry varieties

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Summer-fruiting raspberries

Autumn-fruiting raspberries

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Caring for your plants

Planting

Although you can buy potted plants in spring, bare-root plants, which you can buy between November and March, are more widely available. They also cost less and establish themselves in the garden better than potted ones.

Try a Best Buy watering can

Raspberries need sun and fertile, well-drained and slightly acidic soil. Dig a shallow trench, add soil improver and place the canes at 50cm intervals, with the roots lying flat in the bottom. Support plants either singly on posts or by tying-in to different heights of wires in rows. Cover the roots with soil and then water the plants.

Growing in a pot

You can grow raspberries in pots on a patio or balcony. Put one cane in a deep pot that's around 45cm in diameter. Use a Best Buy compost for containers and mix in a Best Buy controlled-release feed. Each spring, remove the top few centimetres of compost and replace with fresh compost and controlled-release feed. Keep the plant well watered, especially during hot, dry weather.

Make things easier with a Best Buy garden irrigation system

However, when we compared growing raspberries in the ground with growing them in pots, there was a huge difference in the size of crop we got. Our pot-grown ‘Glen Ample’ plants produced less than half the fruit we got from plants in the ground (260g per plant compared with 639g per plant in the ground). Pot-grown ‘Tadmor’ gave around a quarter of the crop of the plants grown in the ground, and ‘Valentina’ around half. However, the flavour was rated better for the pot-grown plants for both ‘Tadmor’ and ‘Glen Ample’, possibly because they got less water so the flavour was richer. 

When we tried growing raspberries specifically bred for growing in pots, such as 'Ruby Beauty', 'Groovy' and 'Yummy, we found that they didn't live up to their claims of oodles of fruit from a compact potted plant. We grew autumn-fruiting 'Joan J' in pots alongside the varieties sold as patio raspberries. 

Most of the varieties we grew that were sold as suitable for growing in containers simply didn’t produce enough fruit, tasted bland or grew far too large. None could compete on either yield or flavour with our traditional variety, ‘Joan J’, which gave us 4.5kg of large, delicious, uniform fruits between August and October in 2020, and 2.5kg in 2021 (which wasn’t a good year for fruit).The canes also multiplied well during the trial, filling the pot. If you really must grow raspberries in a pot because you don’t have space for traditionally trained canes, then stick with this upright, autumn-fruiting variety. 

Growing in a pot is worth doing if you don’t have much space or don’t want raspberry canes to spread in your garden, but don’t expect bumper crops and don't bother with varieties sold as patio raspberries.

Feeding

Feed plants in the ground with a high-potash feed, such as sulphate of potash, in spring. Mulch around the plants with soil improver to help keep the soil moist.

Help your plants with recommended soil improvers

Pruning

Summer-fruiting varieties: When cropping ends, cut back all fruited canes to ground level and tie in six to eight strong new canes from each plant. Cut out all other canes.

Autumn-fruiting varieties: If you want a double crop from your autumn raspberries, leave all the canes unpruned after their first summer’s crop. These should produce an earlier crop of fruit in the summer the following year. Once this fruit crop has finished, cut the fruited canes down to the ground. Fruited canes are the older-looking woodier ones, not the new, greener and more flexible canes. Leave all the other canes that have grown that year to produce an autumn crop at the usual time. 

Discover our Best Buy secateurs

How and when to harvest

Summer-fruiting varieties: June to July

Autumn-fruiting varieties: June to October

Net plants to keep the birds off once blossom opens. Pick ripe fruit regularly, as it doesn’t last long. Old fruit left on the canes will rot quickly if the weather is damp. Raspberries freeze well if you don’t want to eat them at once. They also make great jam.

Store your crop in a Best Buy freezer

Common growing problems

Raspberry beetle

The adult beetles emerge from the soil from April to June and are good fliers. They feed on the flowers of the rose family, starting with apple, pear and hawthorn, then move on to soft fruit to lay their eggs in the flowers. The grubs first feed on the outside of the fruit, then move into the central plug. Once fully grown, the grubs leave the ripe fruit, drop to the ground and pupate in the soil.

If present in large numbers, the adults can do significant damage to the flowers, with many fruits being malformed or not developing at all. However, this does not happen very often; the larvae are far more of a problem as the immature grubs spoil the fruit. They produce characteristic dried-out and blackened areas near the plug in the centre where they have eaten some of the developing drupelets – the tiny segments which make up this type of fruit.

If you see grubs on the surface of the berries they can be sprayed with a contact insecticide based on pyrethrum. Ready-to-use pyrethrum-based sprays are convenient to use. To help know the best time to spray, you can use a raspberry-beetle trap four to six weeks before the first flower during April to July.

Spur blight

Spur blight starts on new canes, appearing in August as areas of purple discolouration, often around a leaf bud. These change colour, first to brown, then black, then whitish. In winter they are less distinct but become dotted with tiny black fruiting bodies. The areas of damage also enlarge, affecting lengths of cane up to 10cm long. If the damage girdles the cane, the top may die back. Next year, affected buds may not develop, or they may produce shoots which just die back.

Affected canes can't be treated. Cut them out and burn them.

Overcrowding encourages spur blight. Thin the new canes in autumn to 15cm apart on the training wires. In spring, follow the spray programme outlined for cane blight, starting when the canes are 15cm high.

Cane blight

Cane blight attacks at ground level, but the first symptom you are likely to spot is the shrivelling and dying of leaves on the older, fruiting canes. Look for dark patches on the canes just above soil level. These develop cracks and become covered in black fruiting bodies the size of a pin-head. The canes become brittle and may snap off.

Once spotted, it cannot be treated and should be cut out below ground level and burned. Clean the secateurs with garden disinfectant before pruning any healthy canes.

The spores survive for several years in the soil, so plant new raspberries elsewhere. Do not plant strawberries in infected ground either as this fungus will attack their roots. Replace the plants with new stock every seven to ten years.

Grey mould

Grey mould (botrytis) can form on fruits as they start to ripen, making them inedible, and there is no treatment available. Damaged fruit is very susceptible. There are no chemical controls.

The fungus thrives during cool, wet periods when humidity is high and temperatures are low. A grey-brown or off-white fuzzy growth on the leaves, stems, fruits, buds or flowers of plants is the first thing you are likely to notice. Often when the plant is touched, a cloud of spores will be released into the air. Other symptoms of this disease include petal-spotting, wilting, shrivelling, rotting tissue and dieback. 

Raspberry virus

Initially the symptoms can be very subtle – a gradual decline in the crop, perhaps a little stunting, distortion or discolouration. As the disease builds up, the symptoms become pronounced and crop production may suffer. The leaves become mottled, with yellow patches between the veins.

There is no treatment for virus-infected plants. They should be dug out and burned. 

If you are buying new plants, ask for certified stock; thus should be virus-free. When planting a new raspberry bed, site it away from soil where they have grown before; eelworms can survive for years and travel up to 15m to infect new plants. If this is impossible the only alternative is to replace the soil, taking out a trench 60cm wide and 45cm deep. The infected soil is safe for all other plants except strawberries.

Cane spot

It starts as small purple spots on the canes in May or June. They gradually increase in size to form cankers which look like shallow white pits with a purple edge. The canes may die back, or produce distorted fruit.

A fungus is responsible. It overwinters on affected canes. It also affects loganberries and hybrid berries.

Affected canes cannot be treated. Cut them out in autumn.

Mineral deficiency

The two most likely deficiencies are of iron and magnesium. The symptoms are yellowing leaves, especially between the veins, with the veins remaining green. These symptoms can look similar to viruses so it is advisable to treat the plants for mineral deficiency first, as this is curable.

Iron deficiency on raspberries shows up in the youngest leaves first, which can turn completely yellow. It is more likely to occur if your soil is alkaline as raspberries prefer a pH of 6.0 to 6.5. Spray with a foliar feed containing chelated iron. 

If the symptoms are worse in older leaves, you should suspect magnesium deficiency on raspberries, which is more likely on light, acid, sandy soil. It can also occur in soils with excess potassium, which can interfere with magnesium uptake. Spray with a solution of magnesium sulphate (Epsom salts) two or three times at two-week intervals; use about 500g in 10 litres of water.

How we test raspberries

We planted bare-root plants in winter, and then assessed their health and vigour for two years. Plants were fed in spring each year and watered when dry. We picked ripe fruit weekly in the second year – we weighed it, tested it for sugar content (Brix test) and tasted it so we could rate the flavour and texture