How to Grow Raspberries with Katie Oglesby

I recently got to interview one of the most knowledgeable gardeners I've ever met—Katie Oglesby, owner of Katie Oglesby Gardens in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Not only does Katie garden for nine months out of the year in a place I thought you could spend about two days outside without a parka, she's actually grown her own successful gardening business there.

Her garden (pictured below) is one of the most magical places I've ever seen in real life—no exaggeration—and it all started with Katie teaching herself to garden on a little plot of land. In addition to veggies and fruit trees and an entire asparagus forest, she planted a bunch of berries and now grows about a million dollars' worth of raspberries on her one-acre lot. (Okay, that dollar amount might be a slight exaggeration.)

But seriously, you know how expensive raspberries are at the store. You pay like $5 for a little container, and they're not even organic. Katie harvests fresh raspberries for several months and then has a freezer full of homegrown, organic raspberries. And I can tell you, they taste so much better than the ones that are commercially grown.

So I asked Katie to share a bit of her berry magic. Here are her top tips for growing raspberries at home.

Grow Raspberries in Shallow Raised Beds

Katie and her husband learned the best way to grow raspberries through trial and error, and they knew they hadn't quite gotten the setup right when they ended up with a berry bush jungle in their yard. After a couple seasons, this is the setup that they found works best:

• Grow raspberries in shallow raised beds. They're a shallow-root plant, so an 8-inch tall raised bed will do great.
• Each bed should be two feet wide.
• Space your beds four feet apart. Make sure you have an aisle between the beds because if you grow your raspberry plants well—which is what we want—they're going to go wild.
• Fill your raised bed with a soil mix that's heavy on the compost.
• Katie plants her raspberry plants one every foot. She's pushing the limits a bit, which I love her for, but she says, "I'm gonna go big or go home."

Give Your Raspberry Plants a Trellis

You can use cedar posts or metal trellises. Katie's trellises are just made from leftover pipe. Of course, she sets up much nicer trellises for her clients. These vertical posts should be about 4.5 feet tall and spaced every 12 feet.

Whatever you use for your vertical support, you'll then run some wires across—one lower and one higher. She recommends one line about 2 to 3 feet up and another at least 1.5 feet above the first.

Plant Different Varieties of Raspberries

Katie enjoys fresh raspberries from July all the way through November, and the reason is because she plants a lot of different varieties.

She recommends grouping the different varieties together or making sure you know exactly where each type is planted since the best pruning techniques differ based on their season. (Don't worry. She's got a pruning tip for you, too.)

In layman's terms, there are early season, mid season, and fall season raspberries. Early and mid typically benefit from the same pruning techniques, so you can plant those in rows together. Middle season raspberries include black raspberries and purple raspberries, which are phenomenal.

Then you move to fall raspberries, which include reds and yellows. There's even a great pink raspberry that's recently come out.

Don't Buy Commercial Varieties of Raspberries

When you're shopping for berries, always select a homegrown variety or gardener variety. Katie has taste-tested a ton of berries, and those commercial varieties are selected for high production and size—not flavor. If you're used to raspberries from the grocery store, you'll be shocked how delicious homegrown varieties are.

Katie recommends asking other home gardeners in your area what varieties they prefer. She's narrowed it down to her favorite varieties to grow in Wisconsin. She trials every type before she even thinks of putting it in a client's garden—that's how much of a flavor difference the type can make!

Prune Your Raspberry Plant Based on Its Type

Katie's pruning tips were really what I was dying to know.

There's no pruning in year one. When you're growing perennial fruiting plants, that's also the year you don't get a whole lot for your harvest basket. If you happen to have a nice growing season, the cane that will produce the following year will sometimes give you a light fall crop, so that's an added bonus.

In year two, you'll prune last year's cane. You should be able to see a color difference in the canes. For early and mid season plants, you can remove those canes right away because you want air flow within the plant. The best time to prune is around November. Katie will sometimes start pruning in August if it looks too congested inside the bush. Basically, as soon as the cane seems like it's done producing, you can cut it.

Fall bearing plants are the ones that are pruned a bit different. You'll actually take everything down to the bottom so that fresh canes can grow up. They bear fruit on those fresh canes that same year because they're producing so much later in the season.

I was taught to worry about hurting the plant if you leave raw cuts on it when it's still really cold outside, but Katie says she's never had any issues. "Maybe I'm violating a rule," she says. "I do wait till after a couple hard frosts before I will start to take down all those fall bearing, but there's been times, hey, life's busy, and we're out in January, like, Shoot, we didn't get to the raspberries, right? And it's been fine."

Time to Grow Your Own Raspberries

Harvesting your own fresh berries is not just a huge savings if you're someone who buys a lot of those little plastic packages at the grocery store. It's also a luxury. I don't know about you, but I'm looking around my yard now and thinking about adding some rows of raspberries so I can be like Katie Oglesby, the Million Dollar Raspberry Woman. That's what I've renamed her.

Visti Katie's website, sign up for her weekly newsletter, follow her on Instagram, and book her if you're located in or around Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Do it now. I have a feeling her calendar is about to explode once everyone realizes they need her help growing a million dollars' worth of raspberries on their land, too!

Thank you for being here and bringing back the kitchen garden!