You may remember me reporting that most of my yellow raspberries turned out to be red! Well on closer inspection, I noticed that while those bearing red fruit had red thorns on the stems, on the yellow fruiting stems the thorns, like the stems themselves, are green…

Further observation may be required in subsequent years, but I think this will be a reliable way to identify which are which when they’re not bearing fruit. If so, then it’s similar to foxgloves, where the standard purple Digitalis purpurea have dark stems, but the stems of the rarer, white-flowered sports are paler.

I think some of the canes in the pot of supposedly yellow raspberries I bought were actually red. And the red ones seem to spread prolifically (they keep popping up all over the veg plot, and beyond). I’d go back and complain, but the nursery is long gone (perhaps, just as well?) In any case, I took the bold decision to dig out all of the canes with red thorns, leaving just two clumps of yellow-stemmed plants…

When these have finished fruiting I’ll divide them if I can, and reset them along the row. The yellow berries are a little bigger, and seem not be be favoured by the blackbirds, which deprived us of much of the red crop (and have now disappeared, presumably to eat someone else’s raspberries!)