Last year we had a huge crop of raspberries. Large, juicy, tart raspberries by the bucketful. These are great berries and taste incredibly good with ice cream. The berry patch is all mature plants and they have produced volumes for years... except this year. This year we collected five, and I don't mean buckets, I mean five berries.
So who is the raspberry thief and where did they take my delicious berries? That is a darned good question and one that is not easy to answer in a single sentence. The first indication of a problem went almost unnoticed when in the early spring we experienced a long stretch of unseasonably warm weather. The tall, thick raspberry bushes soaked in all the warmth and converted that sunshine in to new buds on the stalks within a few days. I was sure I was going to have a bumper harvest from the number of new buds I counted.
Then it turned cold again - real cold. What followed was 8 weeks of snow, hail, ice and -20C weather - none of which is good for freshly growing plants. When the weather finally warmed up again, the berry bushes had taken a beating and when I was able to get to the plants for the clean up, they had all but completely frozen at the roots. I was only able to save 4 of the plants and even then had to trim them down to 4" stubs to clean out the dead wood. The patch has started to come back now and is prospering, but won't produce a decent berry harvest for a couple of years.
it is somewhat common to have a warm period in the early spring followed by a cold snap, but this year's warm period was unusually long and warm which resulted in the raspberry casualties. The cold snap was also unusually harsh this year. Both of these are indications of global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it. To me it does not matter if this pattern change is the result of a man made hole in the ozone or the natural climate shift as the poles move, or if the tectonic upheavals recently have altered weather patterns permanently. If these climate changes continue to alter crop heath, we will need to start being very careful about what we plant and where, not to mention when.
My raspberry thief was a disappointment but not life threatening, however that will not be the case when it affects the national wheat harvest or decimates an entire region's corn feed crops. If you thought climate change was a political thing or not your problem, maybe this will give us all something more to consider.
