Raspberry help please.

[fourandahalfkids]

I have a few raspberry canes in pots around my patio tbh these have never done particularly well but I do persevere with them. Anyway last year I discovered a raspberry Bush up by my chicken shed. There is no way this is a shoot as my garden is fairly big and my chicken shed is a fair distance from my patio. Anyway, this Bush had the biggest juiciest raspberries on them I think I have ever seen.
I think my free ranging chicken must have enjoyed some raspberries off my patio and deposited some seeds up there.
Fast forward to this year and my chicken has been in the internal garage all winter ( don't ask! I think dh loves he chicken more than he loves me).
So today I went up to the chicken shed and oh boy, these raspberry canes are huge and looking lovely (if not somewhat disorganized and hap hazard), they are untrained, unstructured things of beauty.
Now usually I don't get to garden much as we are a super busy working family, but, times as they are I'm thinking I should do something with them right!
They are growing from a raised area (3 steps high) tumbling over the low wall and trailing out over the lawn. Any suggestions what I should do with them please? Dh wants to chop them all down as they shouldn't be there anyway but I am loave to do that knowing the harvest we had off them last year.
Thank you for your advice.

I'm not an expert just someone who planted two raspberry canes a few years back. Mine are autumn fruiting ones so they fruit on new growth so I cut them back to near the ground each spring. Just as a warning though, as they are not netted and the birds get them I now have dozens of raspberry plants all over that side of the garden in fact they are like weeds!

I’ve just moved my raspberries to the chicken run as I needed them out of the way and the chickens with fertilise them.

You can remove any old canes that have died. If they’re autumn fruiters then you can cut them right to the ground, otherwise you need to leave the canes with leaves.

My plan is to put sleepers around them to make a bed and cut back any shoots that do escape. Then put sticks and wire to keep them upright. The chickens can have the low fruit and any that drop, the rest are for me!

Raspberries are likely to be in short supply this summer because of the twin effect of COVID and Brexit. It would be madness to get rid, tell your DH.

General maintenance for summer raspberries - they fruit on second year wood, so after fruiting, cut down all fruiting canes to the base. Tie the unfruited canes to a framework - this is just for tidiness, so is not essential. And mulch in winter to enrich the soil - though you won't need to do this as they're so near the chicken shed and will presumably have already benefitted from chicken manure.

On the back of this thread how can you tell if they are summer or autumn fruiting? I have a jumble of canes that don't seem to produce much fruit as they are in a shady part of the garden. I want to move them to a new bed but not sure if I should be pruning them.

@perhapstomorrow I’m in the same position. As I’ve always understood it, autumn fruiting die completely back over winter, then new shoots start in the spring. So if all the long canes are dead, and there were no green leaves over winter, then they are autumn fruiting and the long canes can be removed.

Summer fruiting put up new canes in the autumn, to get a head start. So they have old and new canes together. You can remove any canes that are dead but leave the rest.

My problem is that with the mild winter I’m concerned that the plants are confused and the old canes have stayed alive as we’ve had almost no frost. Anyhow, I’ve removed all the dead canes (they snap really easily) and moved my plants.