It’s Raspberry Season!

The massive Tupperware mixing bowl sat on my Great-Aunt Erma’s dining table, mounded over with ripe, red, freshly picked raspberries from her garden. My siblings and I sat around it, fingers stained, bellies sated. And yet more berries awaited picking. I think my family carted home enough to fill three of those huge bowls that day — and my aunt still had more left over.

Aunt Erma grew two things in immense quantities in that backyard garden of hers: raspberries and dahlias. She had no grass that I can remember, only rows upon rows of prickly canes and giant blossoms, the bounty of which she shared freely in their seasons. She lived alone by then, and she couldn’t possibly use everything she spent such time caring for. 

Our hands and bellies were always happy to step in for those berries, and our table never looked more fine than when a vase of those immense blossoms stood in its center.

These memories come back to me every year now as my own raspberry hoard begins to ripen. Nine years ago I purchased two tiny, summer-bearing, full-sun berry plants for an 11-foot-long garden box that I’d situated along the sunny side of my garage. Today that box overflows with canes — I regularly prune back the eager baby canes trying to sprout outside of it.

It treats the eyes almost as much as the taste buds: Great piling mounds of dappled green leaves cover dozens of canes that grow through and over the 5-foot-tall PVC pipe framework I made for them. Berries in various shades of red splash in tiny dots all across that green, waving and seeming to laugh in the breeze.

Raspberry season opens my summer, but it won’t produce much if I don’t prepare. So every year in April and May, I attempt to control all those canes that so naturally eschew confinement:

I cut off the old, dead canes that grew new just two years before, sheering them at their base and untangling their dead brown lengths from among the fresher greenery.

To encourage a final bit of growth and branching, and therefore more berries, I trim the ends of year-old canes that will be responsible for this year’s crop.

I tie new twine to the pipe frame and encircle clusters of canes, training them to grow closer together so that some space between the clusters can remain for sunlight and my arms.

And I water, water, water, and delightedly watch the little bees as they flit from flower to budding flower.

Then, every other day throughout June as the berries ripen, I play a game of hide-and-seek with raspberries. I look under and over, up and down and through. I push leaves aside, scratch my arms as I reach into the depths between canes, and squint and sweat in Chicago’s hot sun as I seek the last few ready berries of the day.

And I come away with cups and cups and cups of my favorite fruit, ready to be washed, devoured, frozen, made into baked goods, or turned into jam. The season is short and highly involved, but the powerfully tangy flavor of those summer-bearing berries is worth every ounce of labor.

I could plant the ever-bearing type and have piles of raspberries all summer long, but I know I wouldn’t have the stamina to keep up with them. And their flavor, while still delicious and oh-so-raspberry-y, doesn’t carry quite the same potency as the summer-bearing varieties.

So I content myself with this brief and glorious beginning to my summer. It usually culminates just in time for me to use my last berries for some patriotic desserts on the Fourth of July, and then it’s done. For the rest of the summer I tend to my other garden boxes without needing to worry too much about what the raspberries are doing.

Then come fall, at the end of the general harvest season, I give the new canes a small trim, pruning them back to manageable levels for the winter. I tie up any last sections that need some extra support, and I watch their leaves drop down into their box to shelter their roots as the weather grows colder.

All through the winter, it’s impossible to tell the oldest canes from the youngest. But spring will come again. Raspberry season will come again. And I’ll be able to enjoy the whirlwind of their care and harvest again too, soon enough.

Here’s some other articles and stories featuring nature!

• Almost Paradise – The Creative Garden Series – Fiction
• Walking Three Times Daily
• Storm Season
• Waterfall Bathing in Prony Bay, New Caledonia
• The Anatomy of a Memory, Part 1 & Part 2 – Fiction

Tandy Malinak

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Tandy Malinak was engrossed in visual art, stage performance, and storytelling before she knew what the words meant. A second-generation homeschooler with a BA in Elementary Ed, she also knows kids and homelife; set her down with a cup of tea, and she’ll go until you stop her. She loves fantasy, sci-fi, Nintendo, board games, studying the Word, the smell of a campfire, the sound of ocean waves, and all things feline—to name a few! Originally from Seattle, Tandy now lives in Chicago’s northside with her husband, 2 dragon-loving kids, and 4 cats.

Tandy recently perched herself on Twitter’s branch. She’s still figuring it out, but will make noise there eventually.

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