Wild raspberry

Rubus idaeus

Clearings, felled and burnt ground, windthrow and woodland edge. It follows disturbance and light, and it goes again as the canopy closes.

Wild raspberry — botanical illustration
Wild raspberrylifts off a white core, cane is prickly
Do not confuse it. Two red-berried poisoners share the same edges. Mezereon (Daphne mezereum) carries red berries sitting DIRECTLY on a bare, thornless stem with no stalk; the whole plant is poisonous and the sap blisters skin. It is scarce in Britain and frequent through central Europe. Black bryony (Dioscorea communis) is the common one in southern Britain: a vine twining through hedge and scrub, hung with strings of glossy red berries, and no prickles anywhere on it. A raspberry is not a single smooth berry at all. It is an aggregate of small drupelets that lifts off a white core and leaves that core behind on a prickly cane. A smooth round red berry on a smooth stem is something else, whatever else it may be — and that structure is a starting point, not a licence to stop looking.

Ripe fruit comes away leaving the white core on the plant; anything that needs pulling is not ready. Raspberry ground is also good tick ground — waist-high, damp and shaded — so it is worth checking yourself afterwards. Old railway land and industrial edges grow it well and are poor places to pick.

Where people are picking now

the best place in the region — not an average over the region. Regions are ranked by today's number.

The fraction beside the stage says how many measurement points out of how many the region was computed from. “1/22” means the weather history was long enough at one place out of twenty-two: the number describes that place, not the whole region.

  1. Emilia-Romagnadropping100
  2. Friuli-Venezia Giuliaripe100
  3. Piemonteripe2/49100
  4. Toscanadropping100
  5. Trentino-Alto Adigeripe100
  6. Valle d'Aostadropping75
  7. Abruzzodropping74
  8. Venetodropping19
  9. Ticinodropping16
  10. Calabriadropping0
  11. Campaniadropping0
  12. Goriškadropping2/40

The forecast is computed for 17 regions out of 583. The rest are not listed — that is "not computed", not "no berries".

Map

The field is built from a network of measurement points, the way a meteorologist draws a rainfall map from a network of stations: the value is computed at each point and interpolated between them. A cell is about 250 km² across, which is the resolution our weather data comes at, and we do not draw it finer: that would be invented precision. Only the “how much” goes into the colour, not the stage: “a little, ripe” and “plenty, still green” look the same on the map — read the stage on the card. Blank cells are where the season history was too short to compute, not where the berry is absent.

All berries, compared for today

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