​Digging out the summer raspberries

Wednesday 8th November
I came down to the site just in case the farmer with his tractor turned up to tidy up the compost etc. The appointment was tentative so rather than wait around I went onto my plot to do some work. I planned to stop if he turned up but he didn't - so I got quite a bit of work done.
Now I have actually ordered new raspberry stock I started digging out the old stools. I soon realised I needed a something to keep the bindweed roots in so fetched a large pot as my buckets are all in use.
I also soon realised that the roots of the raspberries went deep and spread wide and I was unlikely to get everything out. I had to extract the posts and wires to get a clear run at the bed. However the thick roots went deeper than the spade and the fine roots, which can produce shoots, were everywhere. If I planted the new stock in the row there was bound to be old stock shooting up amongst it.
The solution I decided was to swap the courgette bed with the raspberries. If raspberry shoots appear amongst the courgettes I can dig them out at the end of the season.

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I finished up with a pile of raspberry roots and a pot full of bindweed roots. I added the latter to the bucket of water where I drown them weighed down with a brick.



However, I then realised that I needed to sort out the jungle that was the blackberry at the end of this year's courgette bed if I was going to plant the raspberries next to it. It took a while to prune out the fruited shoots and the weakest of the other shoots. The heap of prunings (on the left of photo) was pretty big. Several shoots had touched ground and rooted, something I hope to avoid next year!

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​I then replaced the wires between the posts with canes resting on screw/nail spikes and wired into place and tied two or three blackberry shoots along each ready for next year's crop. Everything looked nice and tidy but there was another pile of debris to dispose of.




​I still need to dig over the courgette bed ready for the new raspberry stock.

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​Once again I went home under a lovely sunset.