This week, I am at my grandma’s house. She has a garden, some goats, two donkeys, and uncountable wild cats who live outside. First, here’s a picture of the goats:goats(Sorry, it’s not a very good picture.  There are also a lot more goats than the ones you can see in this picture.  There are actually fifteen of them in total!)

Also, here is something you probably don’t see very often. A raspberry patch!

raspberry1It looks awful now, since the plants are dead for the winter. (But not forever- it’s sort of like hibernating.) The raspberry canes (stems) are the whitish-purple ones. Here’s a picture of the supports they’re on:raspberry3If you look closely, you can see lengths of metal rope coming out of the wooden cross. There is a cross at either end and they hold the ropes up. Raspberries need something like this to grow up, to make harvesting them easier.

Raspberries ripen in the early summer, but you need to work on them year round. In the winter, you’ll need to prune them. I am not an expert on this, but here’s a helpful video from the University of Maine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOzo4s9Z9jE

After pruning raspberries, get rid of the canes.  Otherwise, they might spread diseases to the living plants.

If you want to plant raspberries, you should not plant them anywhere near potatoes unless you hate raspberries. Potatoes will get a disease which can kill raspberries, but not show any symptoms. Then they will infect your raspberries.

Happy Hanukkah and I’ll post next week!