North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["William C. Garthright" <billg@inebraska.com>]

Last year, I had a black raspberry cane that bore fruit late. I asked 
about it here and was told about 'crown laterals.' Sure enough, the cane 
died over the winter, and there was nothing unusual about that plant 
this year.

And I had two more of those crown lateral canes this year, from 
different plants. But I also had two canes - from one plant - that seem 
to be something different yet. They seemed to be the 'normal' crown 
laterals at first, though slightly later in development. The berries 
were big, but still green when I was removing the old canes from the 
patch. (The birds had definitely discovered the raspberry patch by then, 
so I covered the fruit with nylon booties.)

When ripe, the fruit was bigger than the raspberries in the rest of my 
patch (all of which was planted by the birds, so this could easily be a 
different bird-planted variety), though it wasn't as tasty. It wasn't 
bad, just not up the the really great raspberry taste of the others. But 
what's really odd is that both fruiting canes had vigorous green shoots 
growing from about halfway up the cane. I've certainly never seen that 
with any other fruiting raspberry cane.

I just checked them again. The berries are long since picked, of course. 
But one of these canes has two vigorous, growing shoots, from half-way 
up the cane, that are more than two feet long (although they look 
vigorous, they don't appear to be growing all that quickly - of course, 
it's been very dry here lately). The other has two shorter shoots - less 
than a foot long, I guess - but one of those has blooming flowers on the 
end!

Can anyone tell me what's going on here? I don't imagine these are 
anything unusual. I'm sure they're just a different variety of 
raspberry, another one planted by the birds. But they seem to be quite 
different from the rest of mine. I don't know what to expect from those 
growing shoots.

Thanks,

Bill
Lincoln, NE (zone 5)

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