Life in the Raspberry Patch

In my yard I have several patches of black raspberries.  A few of the canes I bought for planting; those are named varieties (including the ones next to the yellow raspberries, which were supposed to be red but came in black). Most are wild ones, and they perform considerably better.

Black Raspberry Patch

This year, the black raspberries along the south edge of the ritual meadow, supported by the fence, are fruiting like mad.  I have already picked several baggies of berries.  Once I got a full bag right after someone else took half a bag!

Wildlife and Raspberries

I’ve been reading about permaculture recently, including the food web. Since I very rarely resort to pesticides, my yard is teeming with minute wildlife. While picking berries, I was amazed by two things: 1) the huge variety of insects and spiders swarming through the patch, and 2) the fact that they weren’t devouring the berries or the leaves.  There are a few holes nibbled in the leaves, and the overripe berries get eaten, but the unripe and ripe berries are almost untouched.  Apparently the bugs are so busy eating each other that none of them have time to do significant damage to the crop. Sometimes birds eat the insects too.

Sadly my camera is not suited to photographing bugs.  I did turn up some resources online.  This page shows miscellaneous insects attracted to raspberries; I’ve seen aphids and a couple of stinkbugs in my patch (sometimes alive, sometimes in a predator’s mouth).  This page shows some beneficial insects; we have vast numbers of ladybugs.

Pesticides (or Lack Thereof)

There are several reasons why I don’t use much in the way of chemicals on my plants:

• Chemicals are expensive; I’m broke.
• I’m allergic to a lot of things, so I try to avoid possible allergens.
• No matter how “safe” the label says it is, I can usually taste the stuff in the food after the recommended delay time, which makes it useless around edible crops before harvest.
• I have minimal time to work outside, and better things to do with it.
• I know that chemicals tend to be bad for the environment.

Sometimes that adds up to spotty or absent fruit.  If I want to eat pears, most of the time that means picking up a bucketful of them off the ground and cutting out the good chunks.  (Results: excellent stewed pears for use as ice cream topping or pie filling.)  But other times it results in a happy balance, like this raspberry patch which is full of both bugs and raspberries.

One final note about bugs and fruit: If you pick your own fruit, you will sometimes eat a bug.  Don’t worry about it too much.  Blow or rinse away the ones you can see.  You won’t get all the ones you can’t see.  Unless you do something really careless like putting a bee in your mouth, eating the occasional bug is unlikely to cause harm.  Although one of the great culinary rules is “Americans do not eat insects,” our closest cousins — the chimpanzees — do eat insects so our bodies have some evolutionary background for it. People who are really squeamish about bugs should settle for commercially grown fruit.