Raspberries & Pears tea is delicious. And it looks just like real tea too.

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Howevah, I harvested so many raspberries last year, and we made so much marmalade that I can afford to forgo them for at least a year. Therefore, I decided to not only prune out the dead two-year-old shoots, but to top the whole growth.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This is where it was. I will sprinkle a bucket of wood ash over the area sometime towards the end of February, and possibly also add some calcium nitrate/potassium nitrate for nitrogen in the growing season. This way, it should develop strong, over 1 m long and 1 cm thick shoots that will flower and fruit next year. And at the same time, I had paradoxically less work cutting down the whole growth than I would have if I just gone through carefully cutting out the dead wood. I only left a small patch inside my garden where I will just prune out the dead wood. That way, I could get a few cups of fresh raspberries to eventually replenish my tea for next winter. And if not, then not, this is not an essential crop.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This is a pile of all the shoots, with a significant portion of Symphoricarpos albus mixed in. My late neighbor planted it in the corner of her garden multiple decades ago, and over time, it spread and wandered outside and proved impossible to completely eradicate. I am constantly at war with the weed inside my own garden, where it encroaches near the water cleaning facility and makes the area difficult to access for maintenance. It is also extremely tough and dense wood – I could cut the raspberries with a hedge trimmer, but I had to use a chainsaw for the Symphoricarpos albus.

I will put all this through the shredder to make it into wood chips. And I probably will not use these particular woodchips as fuel; they are very light and not very suitable for that anyway. I will use them as mulch on my vegetable patches instead, to try to reduce the germination of Veronica chamaedrys.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Most of the snow melted, but freezing temperatures returned with a vengeance. I still cannot work in my workshop because it would take three-four hours of heating each day to get the temperature high enough that my protective gear does not fog and/or drip water condensate everywhere. However, it is freezing and sunny, so I can finally start to work outside. I cannot say how much I love working outdoors, despite my feeble body. So I am slowly cutting the hornbeam hedge around my front yard an hour-two a day, and in the remaining time I am pruning my coppice with my chainsaw. The chainsaw is significantly lighter than the hedge trimmer, so the second work is actually the one where I rest from the first. Wielding the hedge trimmer at shoulder-height is exhausting.

So far, I cut a few of the thickest trunks from the coppice, but I have not done a full harvest – I might do that next year again. In the next few days, I will go into the coppice with long pruning shears and cut out about 200 pieces of 2 m long shoots for beans, although I intend to concentrate mostly on bush beans this year.