I say it every year: black raspberry season is my favorite fruit season of the year. Now that we have our own plants established, I no longer have to trek through timber and brush fending of sparrow sized mosquitoes with one hand and carefully dodging the thorns of multi-flower rose bushes with the other while hunting for wild black raspberries – that is, unless I want to find just a few more.

In addition to the black raspberries this year, we’re also getting our first taste of something a little different – yellow raspberries. We landed two bare-root yellow raspberry plants as a gift from a mail-order nursery last year. They spent most of the year just putting down roots, so this is the first taste of the yellow berries we’ve had.

Our plants are the “Anne” variety of yellow raspberries that were developed from a strain of red raspberries. The color is caused by a missing pigmentation gene that would cause the berries to appear red. So, as you might imagine, the berries taste similar to a traditional red raspberry, though they are slightly larger and sweeter. Yellow raspberries are softer than red raspberries and don’t ship well, so don’t expect to find them in the grocery store.

Now that the plants are established, I’ll prune them the same as our red raspberries and we’ll only have one heavy crop of yellow berries in the fall. Since the kiddos typically manage to eat most of the red raspberries as soon as they ripen, I’m hoping these may find their way into a few jars of jelly or pie filling… a yellow raspberry pie – that should create a conversation over dessert.