One of the things that’ve done with our property is to promote the natural bounty that Alaska has to offer. Wild raspberries, and other native fruits, are exceptionally easy to find growing practically everywhere around us.
Years ago, we started to maintain our wild raspberries not too dissimilarly to how one prunes and maintains domesticated raspberries. Essentially, this involves removing the old, dead raspberry canes and allowing the new, fresh ones to grow without competition. We usually do this maintenance in the spring, once budding occurs, so it’s easier to identify which is which. In “warmer” climates, it’s usually done in the “fall” once the plants die back…but that’s usually full on winter for us.
Since we’ve been doing this, our wild raspberries have been exceptionally healthy and produce an immense amount of berries for us every season. Enough that we can’t even harvest them all! As we mentioned earlier this year, it’s also one of the best magnets you can have to get pollinators to visit your gardens.
The best thing about promoting native fruiting plants is that there’s very little maintenance that needs to be done. It’s truly effortless gardening. They just do their thing. Even if we didn’t help them along, they’d still produce plenty!
We love our wild raspberries. Our plan is to make more freezer jam with these. We’re definitely ramping up our busy schedule with regular, near daily harvests, so an easy preservation like freezer jam is just what we need!
Also, fun little game in this pic. One of these things is not like the other. 😁
