It's A Start on the Road to Normalcy!

Hooray and happy to say I started feeling much better on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, however (per Susan's instructions), Papa Pea kept me velcro-ed to the couch anyway.  But this morning he asked if I felt up to pruning the raspberries today.  Wa-HOO, ya sure and you betcha!  It was my first day of working outside.

These are our three rows of raspberries before pruning.

We like to get the pruning done before the leaves bud out, but didn't make it this year.  (We're getting at the task about a month later than in a normal year.)  But as hubby pointed out, it sure makes it a lot easier to tell the dead canes from the live ones when you see the green leaves all over the live canes!

Our system works well; Papa Pea snips of the dead canes, hands them to me and I pile them in the garden cart to be hauled away.

Here's the "after" picture.  Sure looks a lot different doesn't it?  That big space between Row One and Rows Three and Four is because I took out Row Two years ago.  It was a fall-bearing variety of raspberry which never did diddly-squat in our northern climate.  Each and every year, just as the berries were almost ripe in the fall, a hard frost would hit and zap the whole crop.  Actually the width now between Row One and Row Three is none too wide.  It's amazing how thick and bushy (and impenetrable)  the canes will be in short order.  Working in between Rows Three and Four to pick those berries when they're ripe is like walking through a thick jungle . . . with no native guide.  Or machete.