We are expanding our vegetable garden, and I wanted to put in a row of raspberries (hardly vegetables but you get the idea). My wife is against it because raspberries spread so many underground roots and sap the energy of the rest of the soil and interfere with other plants. I’m sure she’s right. What do gardeners do to stop the spread of raspberries?
To keep the raspberries from infiltrating the vegetable bed, you could install a root barrier such as gardeners use to contain bamboo. Even more simply, you could set the planting area apart from the veggies with fairly deep edging material–such as one might use to keep grass from invading garden beds. I’m sensitive to proposing something that is a lot of work, but you could make a dedicated raised bed for raspberries along the edge of the vegetable bed. I’m a fairly lazy gardener, and I planted raspberries amongst all my other plants. When the berries run to areas where they are unwanted, I just pull them out. But you will get a better, easier to harvest crop if you provide them with their own area. This Fine Gardening article addresses the issue of running, as well as ideal planting conditions:
Excerpts:
“Raspberries are joyfully exuberant about procreating by underground runners, poking up impressive numbers of healthy new plants all around your original patch. I don’t consider this to be a problem, though, because one whack of the hoe takes care of them. You can also present them to a friend or use them to extend your patch. […] If you have rich, deep soil that drains well year-round, you can simply plant your raspberries in a permanent garden site. Not us. The Pacific Northwest gets rain all winter, and many gardeners lose raspberries to root rot because they make the mistake of planting their raspberries’ fussy little toes directly in the ground, which is often soggy clay covered with a skim of topsoil. We also experience a two-month drought most summers. Raised beds allow us to have deep soil that holds moisture evenly yet drains well.”