Rasberry crop failure again

This year, I was sure I had a good crop. Plenty of flowers, but when I looked at them today, all gone. Ocasional partial berry, mostly just nothing. Same thing happend last year. My parrents had a patch that never did this. Any Ideas?

sounds like birds to me. When you say partial do you mean growth or just part of a berry left there? I have raspberries too and the Mocking birds,cat birds and chipmunks love them.

Thanks for the input. It is mostly dead flowers and a coulple berries that just developed one or two lumps. No sign of having been eaten. We had a lot of rain, and I wonder if that could have caused this.

Yeah, it really seems like a plant disease or something.

Raspberries want it hot and sunny...

I know that the rain has hurt my garden a lot, and has brought out a lot of slugs...

The other thing to look at is what sort of pollinators you have in your area... Raspberries are very dependent on getting insect pollination, if they don't get it, you don't get fruit... Do you see honeybees in your area? What about bumblebees and other small pollinator insects? Do they spray alot in your area? That could be a part of your problem...

Gooserider

My tomatoes are just starting to take off. I hope they get some strength before the tomatoes get any bigger. A 1 foot tall plant doesn't do well with those big beefy tomatoes holding it down.

Peas like it cooler so they did well. Beans are just starting to come out. We'll see how the squash and melons do. They look like they are finally getting going.

I don't know if it was the rain or the lack of sun. I'm thinking lack of sun. My beds are raised on top of a sandy soil. Drainage shouldn't be a problem.

Matt

Thanks for the input folks. Two years in a rw is pretty disapointing.

It is called the store bought tomatoes are a different variety (which probably won't grow well from it's own seeds as it is a hybrid), that was bred for marketting purposes - i.e. resistance to bruising / shipping damage resistance, extended shelf life, ability to be picked green and ripen after being picked, etc... The garden tomatoes, especially "heirloom" varieties, are bred for taste, etc. since nobody would want to go to all that work to raise something that comes out like a store tomato...

Gooserider

I'll wger it's too much rain and not enough sun. Local berry growers are all singing the same tune and so is just about everyone else. There were just about 5 (count 'em!) sunny days in June and we received well over 15" of rain (nearly 3x normal) which has set up optimal conditons for rot.

Stories on the local news just last included a tomato grower who has Botrytis in his greenhouses (very rare) and an alert to be on the lookout for Blight, an airborn fungal disease that entred the state on tomato plants from a big box store and is now threatening the state's potato crop (the same blight that killed huge portions of the population in Ireland).

Our lettuce and broccoli looks fine (so far), the tomatos are holding their own, but the eggplant may turn out to be a bust this year. Brussel Sprouts look good, as do cabbages. What has saved us has been the fact that the vegetable garden is all raised beds so the soil drains well, but the plants still need some sun and some warmth.

The annuals in the windowboxes have put on some growth but nearly what they have done in years past. Hostas and Hydrangeas look good, but the Peonies had a tough year. The rains arrived at the end of the run of Bearded Iris and Papaver so I was able to enjoy those! Weeds doing marvelously, as are the slugs.

We planted raspberries this spring. How do you keep the birds off the fruit?

The combination of the grade of the garden terraces and a lot of free mulch from the city pile has mitigated the extraordinary amount of rain we have had. Hopefully the sun in the forecast will give the plants a chance to take advantage of all that moisture in the ground.

I've had a little bit of grey fungus / mold this year.
My cherries all split from the rain.

I've had small berries in the past, but htat was with very very old canes / plot.

When I lived on the Cape (Sandwich) I had two inches of dirt for a lawn on top of sand.
Rasberries never got big , neither did the canes and the leaves were a bit yellow.
Trying to grow Rhubarb was a joke, too.
I dug a trench next to the row of rasberries about a foot deep, removed half of the sand and added compost and peat and let the canes send thier runners into that and eventually keeping those plants in that bed.
It helped, but sand isn'r very good for gardening in. :-(

Where I am now in SE Mass has better soil and I use oak leaves for mulch and wood chipps from chewed up branches.
Don't have much problems with birds (that I see), but the japanese beatles here are awful. Those bag a bug thingies worked well last year.

I see a lot of people using netting over blueberry bushes and they'd work pretty well on raspberry canes, too. But you have to watch them because sometimes birds get under them or get caught in them.

I haven't got any raspberries yet and the mulberrys weren't as plentiful.

Overall a very bad summer for crops.

Tomatoes are now coming in. Have a few peppers and some zucchini, beans and not much more. Lettuce did well and the carrots are now about ready. Garlic, ok.

i'm not sure whats going on with Dune's berries. I've seen lots of wild raspberries while hiking this year. I'm not sure how much different they are from "domesticated" ones, but they don't seem to be too bothered by the rain. I'd point to pollinaters as Goose mentioned. I know lots of the insects have been adversely effected by the moisture. Lots more fungi attacking insects (note the short gypsy moth season this year, reportedly due to some fungus that kills them off). I used to have raspberries and those things are like weeds. Took me 3 years of cutting and burning to wipe them out. As an added bit of knowledge......To the best of anyones knowledge, there are no poisonous cluster berries (raspberry/blackberry looking berries). Neat-o!

My friend has what looks like a great tomato crop coming in, but they are about 2 weeks behind their usual schedule... My pepper plants are finally starting to make a little, but again they are smaller and later than I would expect for this time of year... OTOH my neighbor is getting a decent crop of raspberries, and looks like a really great crop of blackberries should be coming in w/in a few weeks.

Seems to me like the rain and cold weather has slowed things down, but not stopped everything... The biggest problem I've seen this year has been slugs - the rain has really brought out a LOT of them, and it has been so wet that it hasn't been practical to put out much of the slug bait that I normally use...

Doesn't pose a big problem, but the wood in my backup piles that I've been moving into the shed is covered w/ an amazing number of slugs - I often see two or three on every split... They go away within a few days after getting the wood into the shed though, as it dries quickly once it is no longer getting rained on regularly.

Gooserider

Yep, my garden is a bust this year, except for some blueberries that are looking pretty good so far. Tomatos might still come in, but it's not looking good.

The only thing here that seems to be liking the weather is the cabbage. Even the zucchini plants look as if they basically want to give up- and I can't ever recall a time that they didn't thrive (or try to take over...).

I am in north central NJ. We are having a very good rasberry season. They are just wild, along the hedgerows. I don't do anything to help them. I picked some and ate them today. Come take some if you want!

We planted a dozen or so starts in the spring that started bearing fruit in the last week. Our 3 year old seems to be more than able to consume all they produce but I am happy they made it.

My friends tomatoes are finally starting to come in - he put some out for sale today for the first time this year.

Some of my peppers are starting to take off, but not all - I seem to be getting a lot of production from my Super Chili's, and have started to make on the Jalapenos and Cherry Bombs, but none of the sweet peppers have done more than flower yet. My brocoli is getting tall and spindly, but no heads yet. Most of my squashes, or at least the ones that are surviving, seem to be blossoming, and have been for a couple of weeks, but they don't seem to be making. Onions look to be doing well... Lettuce seems to be mixed at best, and some of it seems to be bolting. Most of the herbs are also doing pretty well.

I've been getting MAJOR damage from slugs or something that eats lots of holes in the leaves of stuff, but there has been too much rain to put out slug bait...

It seems like my fence has been doing a pretty good job of discouraging the critters, though not perfectly. We did see a skunk in the driveway tonight when we came home from being out, but I couldn't tell where it came from...

Gooserider

Here in central New York my blueberries are a bountiful harvest again this year. There is lots of new growth on the plants. The only things making the plants grow is whatever nature provides. Perhaps all the rain has been the miracle worker.

John_M

We've had the same experience. Tomatos, peppers, onions, lettuce herbs, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, fruits all are doing well. The periods of sun in the past few weeks seems to have put all the moisture in the ground to good use. The only spoilers this year have been the broccoli and cauliflower.

Vaccinium corymbosum (highbush blueberry) is native here, loves the acid soil and soggy conditions. They're loaded with berries and the birds snag them as soon as they ripen. It's one of my favorite shrubs, rock solid hardy, unfussy, handsome bark and structure, impeccible foliage, and fruit. What more could you ask for?

Annuals are doing OK, but nothing compared to years past. We've had reliable harvest from the vegetable garden but the tomatos are at least 2 wks. behind and I've not hear a status report on the eggplant so it may well be a goner... . Most of the perennials in the borders are 2 wks. behind, too. I generally have Oriental lilies by now and they're still only in bud; a later flowering Astilbe stand is in full bloom and is beautiful, but they're water hogs anyway.

Well, the rasberry crop is a total failure again this year. I am not happy let me tell ya. The patch is big and vibrant, lots of new canes, PLENTY of flowers, was looking good, then the flowers turn all black and disgusting looking. I am thinking about plowing them all under. Glad I never invested in the huge rasberry farm I used to fantasize about. (Back in the early nineties I was told rasberries could produce 12-14K per acre. At the time, a bunch of cranberry bog was available cheap, due to oversupply.) ARGH.