Growing Raspberries: A Complete Profile

By Growing Home Greens Team · August 6, 2026

Raspberries are the best value fruit in a garden: cheap to buy as bare-root canes, hardy to zone 3, and producing fruit that costs an absurd amount in a shop and goes mouldy on the way home.

They also travel. That’s the part nobody mentions.

Summer-bearing or everbearing, and why it decides your pruning

A raspberry plant is permanent; its canes are not. Each cane lives two years. It grows one year (a primocane), fruits the next (a floricane), then dies.

Summer-bearing types fruit on floricanes, so this year’s new growth is next year’s crop. You cut out the canes that just fruited, right after harvest, and tie in the new ones. Cut the wrong ones and you have removed next summer’s raspberries.

Everbearing types fruit on primocanes, at the top of canes grown that same season, in late summer. This is the easy option: in winter you can cut the entire patch to ground level and it still crops the following autumn. No cane identification required.

If you’re new to cane fruit, plant everbearing. The pruning question is the main reason raspberry patches fail, and everbearing removes it entirely.

The suckers

Red raspberries spread by underground suckers, and they don’t respect your bed edging. Left alone, a tidy row becomes a thicket four feet wide, then comes up in the path, then in the next bed.

Plan for it. Either give them a bed with a physical root barrier, or accept that once a year you walk round the patch with a spade and cut down through the soil at the boundary. Black and purple types don’t do this, which is a strong argument for them in a small garden.

What goes wrong

Canes flop and the fruit is on the ground. They reach 5-6 feet. They need wire, a fence, or posts. This isn’t optional.

Fewer, smaller berries each year. Usually overcrowding: too many canes competing. Thin to about four to six strong canes per foot of row.

Sudden collapse of healthy-looking canes. Often verticillium wilt, which lives in soil that previously grew potatoes, tomatoes, peppers or aubergines. Don’t plant raspberries into a bed that recently grew nightshades. Since the canes will be there for a decade, this is worth checking before planting rather than after.

The patch declines after several years. Virus, carried by aphids, accumulates. Buy certified virus-free stock, and expect to replant somewhere fresh after ten years or so.

Where to put it

Full sun, along a fence or with a wire run, and out of the way of anything you want to keep tidy. In the Garden Designer it’s trellised and tall, so it belongs on the north edge where it won’t shade the rest of the bed.

Sources: Growing raspberries in the home garden, University of Minnesota Extension; Home Garden Raspberries and Blackberries, University of Georgia Extension.

Companion planting guide for Raspberry · Find your planting dates

Typically viable in USDA zones 3-8. Not sure your zone? Look it up by ZIP code.

Method: Buy as a start: Buy as a nursery start and transplant outside. Raspberry is slow or unreliable from seed, so most gardeners skip seed-starting it entirely.

See exact start-indoors, direct-sow, and harvest dates for your zone →

How many Raspberry plants fit per square foot?

Spacing: about 4 square feet per plant (square-foot-gardening spacing). Mature height: 5-6 ft.

Varieties worth considering

• Summer-bearing (floricane): One heavy crop in early summer, on canes that grew last year. Traditionally the better flavour. The catch is that you must be able to tell this year's canes from last year's when you prune, because cutting the wrong ones means no fruit at all. (source)
• Everbearing (primocane): Fruits in late summer and autumn on canes grown the same season. Easier to manage, because you can mow the whole patch to the ground in winter and still get a crop. Start here if you have not grown cane fruit before. (source)
• Black and purple types: Different species from the red ones, with a more aromatic fruit. They do not sucker the way reds do, which makes them easier to contain, but they are less cold-hardy and more prone to virus. (source)

Cited from the source shown next to each variety. We haven't grown these ourselves yet, so treat this as a research-backed starting point, not a personal endorsement.

Where to buy raspberry starts

Raspberry is almost always bought as a nursery start rather than seeded. Check a local nursery or garden center; we haven't vetted online start/plant suppliers yet.

See it growing

Search YouTube for "growing raspberry" videos → (a live search, not a hand-picked video; results vary and aren't vetted by us)

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Growing Raspberry: Summer-bearing or everbearing decides when you prune, and pruning the wrong canes is why most raspberry patches stop producing. Plus the wandering-sucker problem.

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