Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Compost for my dying raspberries.

Empty compost bin. You were right Mark. Patience.
My raspberries look awful. They have slowly turned brown. I've been cutting back the dying bits hoping they would shoot out some nice new green growth. No such luck, and now I have a raspberry plant with a few stalks, a few dead leaves with just a blush of green on one leaf. The other is dying really fast. It looked good, set some raspberries and suddenly started turning brown as well.
One almost dead raspberry
The other very dead raspberry
My gold raspberry is going gangbusters, so I really don't understand. I wrote to Marigold Nursery and she suggested that I feed them and maybe they will send up some new growth. Sounds good to me. So me, being me, I gave them a heck of a treatment today. I never do anything half-assed. First I mixed up a batch of my wonderful Seawood Liquid. Watered it in well. Then I threw some of my dry fertilizer around each plant. It takes about a month to break down, so it's for the future. Then I set about doing a lot of weeding and general puttering around the yard. I was out all day. After dinner I went outside to putter some more, and thought, I wonder if I can get some compost out of bin one. I started digging around in it and found that there was a LOT of useable compost. I used my pitchfork to sift it a bit (I need to make a compost screen...stat) and started to spread it in the berry bed. There was so much that I put about 3-4 inches in it and brought the soil level back up flush with the bed. I had enough compost to thickly spread around the asparagus plants and the rest of that bed. I put the uncomposted bits in bin two and called it a day. A job well done. I'm achy but satisfied. I got a small handful of strawberries to put on a bit of ice cream tonight. I love berries. Nature's perfectly delicious food.
The berry bed doesn't look bad from a distance.

2 comments:

Mark Willis said...

I hope the Raspberries survive. I wonder what caused them to suddenly go brown? Mine sometimes get some "crispy" leaves when they are really parched, but they never go completely brown. This year they are not parched, because we have had a lot more rain than normal. Perhaps I'll get a bumper Raspberry harvest!

Gardeningbren said...

I am wondering if it isn't raspberry Wilt. You might check this site and then, check your bark.

http://plant-disease.ippc.orst.edu/showdisease.aspx?RecordID=956

Sorry for your loss ;-(