Practical Homesteading

Tag: Wisconsin gardening

  • Growing Everbearing Raspberries in Wisconsin: A Family Patch That Keeps Feeding Us

    Growing Everbearing Raspberries in Wisconsin: A Family Patch That Keeps Feeding Us

    When most of the garden is winding down, we’re still picking bowls of fresh raspberries. Around here, we call them “grandma berries”—and they’ve earned a place in both our fall harvest and our family story.

    Our raspberry starts came from my in-laws’ patch, which began with plants from my husband’s paternal grandmother. In April 2024, we dug out a section of sod on a south-facing hill here in southeastern Wisconsin, planted and watered the starts, and mulched around them with straw.

    Then we let them do their thing.

    And they certainly did.

    Our fairly fertile, loamy soil may have helped them establish themselves. With minimal maintenance, that patch of grass has become a prolific raspberry bed, giving us a smaller crop in July and a much larger one in October.

    The plants spread on their own, too. Red raspberries send up new shoots, called suckers, from buds on their roots. Those shoots become new canes, allowing an established patch to fill in and expand beyond its original planting area.

    Fresh Raspberries When the Garden Is Winding Down

    The fall harvest is my favorite part of growing these raspberries. We generally rely on our canned and frozen fruit rather than buying fruit from the store, and we also preserve surplus produce my sister shares with us—a story I’ve told in “50 lemons and a lesson in waste.”

    We do occasionally bring home bananas, although they usually become banana bread. Apparently, they look more appealing than they taste, at least in our house.

    The raspberries, on the other hand, have no trouble finding willing eaters.

    By early October 2025, about a year and a half after planting, our patch was producing enough berries to fill a big bowl in one morning. Later that month, it was still loaded, right when we thought the season was nearly finished.

    The kids were enjoying every juicy moment. Those berries felt like the last fresh little bits of summer, giving us a reason to step outside and see what had ripened.

    Even the kids couldn’t keep up with the patch that fall, which surprised me. I froze some of the extra berries and later thawed them to make fruit roll-ups with mango from the freezer, without adding sugar. Next time, I’ll strain out the raspberry seeds for a smoother texture.

    If your berry patch gets ahead of you, my post on freezing berries and other no-blanch produce walks through how to save the extras for later.

    A Simple Raspberry Planting and Care Checklist

    If you’re thinking about starting a patch of your own, here are the basics to consider:

    • Choose a sunny, well-drained site. Avoid places where water stands after rain.
    • Start with healthy plants. If you’re buying raspberry starts, look for disease-free nursery stock suited to your growing region.
    • Prepare the bed. Remove sod and perennial weeds, and use a soil test to guide amendments.
    • Plant at the right time. Dormant bare-root starts can go in early in spring, as soon as the soil can be worked. Tender, actively growing transplants should wait until frost danger has passed.
    • Water thoroughly after planting. Continue checking soil moisture as plants establish. During flowering and harvest, raspberries generally need about 1 to 1½ inches of water per week, including rainfall.
    • Mulch around the plants. Straw or other suitable mulch can help conserve moisture and suppress weeds without burying emerging shoots.
    • Keep the patch manageable. Thin crowded canes and remove unwanted suckers to maintain airflow and room for picking.
    • Choose your pruning approach. Everbearing raspberries can be managed for one fall crop or both summer and fall crops; the pruning section below explains each option. 1016
    • Watch for visitors. Check for beetle damage, and keep clear of active wasp nests.

    Our July and October harvests reflect this particular patch grown in Zone 4B. Harvest timing elsewhere will depend on the variety, growing conditions, and when frost arrives.

    Planning a garden around what your family actually eats?

    My “Grow What You’ll Use” printable can help you think through what deserves a place in your garden—and how you’ll use the harvest.

    Get the Free Planner

    Everbearing vs. Summer-Bearing Raspberries

    Our raspberries are everbearing, also called fall-bearing or primocane-fruiting raspberries. Despite the name, they don’t produce continuously all year. The distinction is which canes bear fruit:

    • Summer-bearing raspberries produce their crop on second-year canes. Those canes die after fruiting, while the new canes remain to produce the following summer.
    • Everbearing raspberries produce a late-summer or fall crop on the upper portions of first-year canes. If retained, the lower portions of those same canes can produce another crop the following summer. New canes grow alongside them to provide that year’s fall harvest.

    How to Prune Everbearing Raspberries

    With everbearing raspberries, you can prune for one fall harvest or retain canes for both summer and fall crops.

    For One Fall Crop

    Cut all canes to ground level after the plants become dormant in late fall, or in early spring before growth begins. The new season’s canes will produce the fall crop, but there will be no summer crop from overwintered canes.

    For Summer and Fall Crops

    Keep healthy first-year canes through winter. In early spring, remove the upper portions that fruited in fall, along with winter-damaged growth. The remaining lower portions can produce summer berries.

    After those second-year canes finish their summer harvest, remove them at ground level. Leave the new canes growing that season to produce the fall crop.

    The summer crop depends on those retained canes surviving winter; winter damage can reduce or eliminate it.

    Japanese Beetles and Other Raspberry Patch Visitors

    Our raspberries have needed relatively little attention, but we do keep an eye on a few visitors.

    Japanese Beetles

    Japanese beetles have been our biggest recurring nuisance. They feed on the leaves, sometimes leaving little more than a lacy framework. The plants can tolerate some damage, but heavy feeding can reduce the harvest, so we try to keep their numbers down.

    We tried Japanese beetle traps, but found they seemed to bring more beetles into the area. Wisconsin Extension also cautions that traps can attract more beetles than they catch and may increase damage in small gardens.

    Instead, we usually knock them into a bucket of plain water in the morning and late evening, when we find them more sluggish and easier to collect. Handpicking is a recommended control method.

    I like giving this job to my son, who approaches it with great gusto. At the end of the day, after the chickens are back in their coop, we give them the collected beetles. They absolutely love them.

    Because the beetles become chicken treats, we leave soap out of the collection bucket. An Ask Extension expert recommends collecting without soapy water when the insects will be fed to chickens.

    Chickens With a Taste for Raspberries

    The chickens don’t limit their enthusiasm to beetles. They love the raspberries, too, and their idea of helping includes getting to the ripe fruit before we do.

    Fortunately, the patch produces enough that there is usually plenty to go around.

    Ground-Nesting Wasps

    In 2025, ground-nesting wasps took up residence around the patch. Luckily, no one got stung.

    An active nest is something to keep clear of rather than disturb while picking, weeding, or tending the plants.

    A Family Planting Worth Keeping

    These raspberries have given us a lot of delicious fruit for relatively little work. We turned a section of lawn into a place that feeds us—and kept a family planting growing for another generation.

    Now our children are picking grandma berries of their own.

    Your Turn

    Have you grown plants passed down through your family? I’d love to hear what you’re keeping growing.

    If you enjoyed this look at our raspberry patch, please like and share it with someone who loves growing food. Follow along for more stories about growing food, raising kids, and building community.

    Read More: The Tomato Product I Use Most: Canning Tomato Juice for Winter

  • We Lost Control of the Weeds—But the Garden Still Fed Us

    We Lost Control of the Weeds—But the Garden Still Fed Us

    In our Zone 4B southeastern Wisconsin garden, October is when the season’s successes and misses become impossible to ignore.

    In early July, I wrote that we had spent a few hours each week weeding and that I expected the work to taper off once the garden plants grew larger, shaded the soil, and helped keep new weeds from taking over.

    Reader, it did not.

    By September, the weeds had made themselves entirely at home.

    Tired garden, the chicken is for decoration

    The paths were not neat. Some beds looked tired. A few weeds were tall enough that I began avoiding eye contact with them when I walked past. The garden did not look much like the tidy spring picture I had in my head when every row was freshly planted and full of possibility.

    And yet, when I stepped back from the mess, the larger truth was still there: this garden fed us for months, and it is still giving us food that will carry us into winter.

    It gave us meals on the table, tomatoes in the pantry and freezer, peppers for the freezer and Garden Heat, onions curing in the basement, food for the animals, and a lot of lessons for next year.

    It was not a perfect garden.

    But it was a productive one.

    Seven Pails of Onions for Winter Meals

    Seven pails of onions now means a whole lot of good meals waiting for us this winter.

    I harvested seven pails of red and yellow onions and spread them out on a table in the basement to cure. Once their tops and outer skins are dry, I will move them into storage where they will be easy to reach all winter long.

    Red and yellow onions curing in a basement after a Wisconsin garden harvest.
    Our onion curing setup. I will move these to an out of the way part of the basement when they’re done curing.

    Onions are not the flashiest crop in the garden. They do not have the bright color of tomatoes or peppers, the excitement of the first snap peas, or the immediate satisfaction of a fresh cucumber sliced beside supper.

    But they may be one of the most useful things we grow.

    They become the beginning of soups, sauces, chili, roasts, skillets, stir-fries, and so many ordinary meals that make winter feel manageable and flavorful. A good onion harvest means that, even when the garden is covered in snow, we still have a piece of it tucked into almost every pot on the stove.

    For long-term storage, onions need to cure until their tops and outer skins are dry. Mine are curing in an out-of-the-way part of the basement with good airflow. Once they are dry, I will tuck them into wooden boxes with slats and check them periodically through the winter.

    With any luck, I will still have onions into March, as I did last year. If not, it will not be the end of the world.

    For now, the basement table is full of them—a quiet promise of good meals to come.

    By October, the garden no longer looked like the tidy rows I pictured in spring. The weeds had taken more ground than I wanted to admit, and some plants had simply given everything they had.

    But most of the harvest had already made its way to our dinner table, freezer, pantry, dehydrator, or fermentation jars. Tomatoes became juice, sauce, tomato powder, and freezer bags for later. Sweet peppers were frozen, hot peppers became Garden Heat, and onions became a winter staple. The garden had already done much of its work.

    Not Every Crop Earned Its Space

    A productive garden is not the same thing as a garden where every crop succeeds. A few things disappointed us this year—and a few of those disappointments came with their own lessons.

    Cucumbers and Cucumber Beetles

    After last year’s cucumber crop was one for the books—and gave us plenty to preserve through lactofermentation—I was looking forward to seeing what this year would bring.

    Instead, we got enough cucumbers for one or two batches of pickles and a little cucumber salad, but nowhere near last year’s quantity. Cucumber beetles were a real problem. They fed on the plants and blossoms, and the vines declined quickly after that.

    I was sorely disappointed.

    Next year, I think we need to move the trellis and try a more intentional cucumber-beetle plan from the beginning.

    The Carrots Did Not Last

    We had so many carrots last year that we covered the remaining roots with straw and harvested them fresh from the ground into March—a lovely, low-budget way to keep a crop fresh even in the middle of winter.

    This year, not so much.

    My son got his allotment of fresh carrot snacks. He would wander out to the garden, pull up a carrot, peel it, and eat it—then I would have to remind him to clean up the carrot peels that somehow made their way all over my kitchen floor.

    But we are already out of carrots, and it is only October. I cannot pretend I am not sad about that.

    Twenty-Five Cherry Tomato Plants Were Too Many

    Finally, we made the same mistake we made last year. At the beginning of the season, the cherry tomato plants were small enough that we thought we could manage them. We also thought our son—who loves a quick cherry-tomato pasta that I can throw together in five minutes—would pick them for us so we could make the sauce.

    Spoiler alert: we could not, and he did not.

    That side of the garden became an impenetrable jungle, overrun with tomatoes to the point that other plants were crowded out. About a month ago, I finally became impatient and started pulling vines indiscriminately, tossing them to the side of the garden. The plants underneath seemed to breathe a sigh of relief and finally stretch for the sky.

    Overgrown cherry tomato plants crowding a late-season vegetable garden.
    Tomato jungle

    Consider this a reminder to myself next June: no, you do not need 25 cherry tomato plants in your garden, no matter how much your then-seven-year-old son pleads that he loves the idea of cherry tomato pasta.

    The Weeds Won Some Ground

    Back in my early July garden update, I confidently repeated something my dad has always said:

    “You win or lose the battle with weeds in the month of June.”

    I still think there is truth in that.

    I just failed to account for the fact that weeds do not care about confidence, blog posts, or a very full summer.

    We had a wet season. Then harvest season arrived. Tomatoes needed attention. Peppers needed picking. Food needed preserving. The kids needed us. Work, homestead projects, animals, meals, and all the regular pieces of life kept happening right alongside the garden.

    There were weeks when spending another few hours pulling weeds was simply not the highest-priority job.

    And so the weeds grew.

    I could frame that as failure, but I do not think it is that simple. The plants that mattered most still had enough room to do their work, and the garden continued to feed both our household and our animals.

    The lesson is not that I need to weed perfectly next year. The lesson is that I need a simpler plan for the beds most likely to get away from us when harvest season becomes busy.

    Maybe that means more mulch. Maybe it means clearer paths, fewer crops in one section, tighter spacing where it makes sense, or choosing the beds that truly need attention and letting the less-important areas be a little wilder.

    I am still learning.

    If you garden, I would love to know: what helps you keep weeds from taking over once the busy harvest season begins?

    The Garden Keeps Feeding the Farm

    The garden does not stop being useful when a vegetable is too small, too blemished, too late, or too much for our own dinner table.

    We have fourteen pigs on the farm right now, including eleven feeder pigs. Garden scraps are a meaningful part of what they eat, especially during the abundant months. The trimmings, extra produce, and bits that do not make it into our own meals still become useful food rather than waste.

    Pigs eating vegetable scraps from a homestead garden.

    Even some weeds get used. As I cleared weeds over the last several weeks, I made judgment calls about what was appropriate to feed. A morning-glory vine that appeared in the garden—possibly courtesy of a bird—did not go to the pigs after I checked on it. But some identified, non-seeded plants could go to them, and they happily tore into the stems and leaves.

    I pull weeds before they go to seed so I do not create an even worse problem next year. That matters even more because seeds can survive digestion and end up in manure.

    Before planting this spring, we spread some of our aged manure in the garden. Then, later in the season, volunteer squash plants appeared in a few unexpected spots. I cannot prove they traveled through the pigs, but it seems like a reasonable theory. A few squash seeds may have survived last year’s trip through the system and made their way back into the garden.

    It is a useful reminder that aged manure returns nutrients and organic matter to the soil, but it can also return surprises. Proper hot composting can reduce viable weed seeds, but it needs sustained heat and turning to work well.

    What the pigs do not eat mixes with bedding and manure, eventually becoming compost for future crops.

    Our chickens and two turkeys get their share too.

    That is one of my favorite things about keeping a garden alongside animals. The whole system is connected.

    A tomato that is too soft for the counter may still make a happy pig. Cabbage leaves, squash scraps, greens, and vegetable trimmings become treats for poultry. Then, in time, those animals help feed our family as well, and their waste is recycled into future crops through compost.

    When the growing season is officially finished, we will also let the chickens into the garden beds to scratch through what is left behind. They will peck at insects, turn over bits of soil, catch a mouse or two, and handle their own part of the cleanup.

    The garden may look tired now, but it is still working.

    Potatoes Are Serious Business

    We also have a separate potato garden helping carry the winter-food load.

    Potatoes are serious business around here.

    They may not be glamorous, but they are filling, versatile, and dependable. Along with onions, they are the kind of crop that makes the colder months feel more secure: real food grown close to home, ready for soups, breakfasts, roasts, skillet meals, and all the ordinary dinners that make up a winter.

    We do not grow every calorie our family will eat. We still buy flour, bread, dairy, fruit, and plenty of other groceries. But the garden provides a meaningful share of the vegetables, flavor bases, preserved food, and meal components that carry us through the colder months.

    That matters to me.

    Making the most of what your garden gives you?

    My free Grow What You’ll Use planner helps you decide what to eat fresh, freeze, dehydrate, store, share, or use up this week—before the harvest gets ahead of you.

    Subscribe to Practical Homesteading to get the planner, along with new posts about growing food, feeding a family, and making an imperfect homestead work.

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    Productive Beats Perfect

    A perfect fall garden would have clean paths, weed-free beds, and every crop arranged neatly for one last beautiful photograph.

    Ours did not look like that.

    Ours looked like a real garden at the end of a real season: a little overgrown, a little worn out, and full of evidence that it had worked hard.

    It gave us a season of meals, a winter pantry, food for the animals, and more wisdom for next year.

    I will take that over perfect.

    A Question for Readers

    What did your garden produce this year—even if it did not look the way you hoped it would by fall?

    If this post encouraged you to see your own messy garden with a little more grace, I would be grateful if you shared it with another gardener who might need the reminder: productive is more important than perfect.