Recovering Cut Down Raspberries

Dee in Canton asks, ‘Hi, I’ve had raspberries almost all my life, and unfortunately a line service came in and cut my berries down to about three inches on the ground. They’re red and black, will they come back?”

It’s gonna take some time. Probably took off six eight years of growth at least. They should recover. I would say a good fertilizer in the spring would be something that you want to look at. Not necessarily something designed to make it produce fruit, but something designed to make it produce growth so it can recover.

You have to remember the root system is still big enough to support that three foot or four foot bush, whatever was in there before. So it is going to try to regenerate that growth. I would use the Rohr’s Nursery all season fertilizer for something like that, because it’s designed to create a good top growth and feed it over a long period of time. Then you could use a liquid feed on top of it. That’s gonna be your quickest way to recover.

There’s a product called comeback formula. It’s made by FoxFarm. That is a liquid, that would be a really good thing to use because it will help it recover really well, and it’ll give it a lot of stimulation, but unfortunately there’s not much that you can do other than that.

I would say early early April, hit it with the granular fertilizer, and then we get to the first week of May, hit it once a week with a liquid. Now the granular only has to be done in the spring, and you’re done for the season. But the liquid you could do as often as once a week, and you can really help bring those plants back around. There’s two different types of fertilizer: one’s a very quick release and the other one is like an IV. It’s a very slow release, but using the two in combination is the best way to help it recover quickly.

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