Garden Berry-Picking Time

Leave two hands free for harvesting raspberries, blackberries, and highbush blueberries. Tie the gathering bucket around your waist. Pick more berries in less time.

Don’t bother to wash raspberries. It makes them soggy and is a waste of time. Just eat.

Pick strawberries early in the day for best keeping. Sit down on the job instead of reaping an aching back. Rig up a seat that you can tie around your waist with a belt. Use an old stool and cut the legs down to three or four inches. Staple loops of webbing or rope to the seat to hold a belt. Or use a dairy farmer’s “milking seat.”

If your idea of lazy gardening is to have one major harvest of the entire strawberry crop, order all plants of the same variety. “This year I bought sixty plants, half of one variety and half of another,” says a gardener who strives for no wasted motion in his garden. “I wish I’d ordered just one kind. It seems as though I’ve been picking strawberries forever.”

Do you have everbearing raspberries? Are you like the gardener who has had it with berry picking by the time he has finished harvesting one hundred and ten quarts of strawberries, and bing, suddenly the raspberries are ripe — red rubies that won’t wait even a day beyond readiness to be picked? If you can’t face picking under a merciless July sun, eliminate next year’s summer bearing and have the luxury of picking bug-free berries in cool fall weather. Mow down to the ground all the canes in fall, even this year’s new ones which would ordinarily produce your next July crop. Let the plants put all their strength into next summer’s new canes, for a more vigorous, and probably earlier, fall crop at their tips. You also save the tedious work of cutting out only this summer’s bearing canes, which die after harvest. It’s much less time-consuming to mow down everything. Skeptical? Try it on half your bed.

For an unusual treat, plant golden raspberries and prune for a fall crop only. They’ll bear from September first through October. A believer claims they’re larger and meatier than reds, with a peachlike flavor.

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