Simple to grow with an excellent flavor that’s generally more sweet than tart, yellow raspberries are a type of specialty berry well worth adding to your garden. I have a new garden where my husband and I dug out invasive lily-of-the-valley and daylilies that I want to put to better use. My vision is a collection of berry bushes, including yellow raspberry varieties, because they are survive our cold winters.

Different varieties produce berries ripening to a range of golden shades. These brightly colored fruits are perfect for making head-turning tarts, cobblers, and pies. Besides their hues, yellow raspberries—also known as gold raspberries or goldens—have fewer seeds than blackberries or black raspberry varieties do. That means they also work well in homemade jellies, jams, sorbets, and ice cream.

Golden raspberry varieties

There are two kinds of yellow raspberry varieties. One-crop-per-season types are called “summer-bearing” or “floricane-bearing.” Varieties producing two harvests per season are called “everbearing,” “fall-bearing,” or “primocane-bearing.”

Yellow raspberries produce biennial woody stalks or canes from perennial crowns. During the first year of their biennial lifecycle, the initial canes are called primocanes. During their second year, those first-year canes break dormancy to become second-year floricanes.

Some raspberry plants will only bear fruit on a floricane. These produce one summer crop. By contrast, everbearing or fall-bearing yellow raspberries bear fruit on both cane types, providing two harvests. Typically by late June or July, they’ll set fruit on their (second-year) floricanes. Then, by August or September, they fruit along their primocane growth until the first frost.

ellow raspberries perform best in fertile, well-drained soil and full sun. However knowing where to grow yellow raspberry plants is also about knowing where not to grow them. For instance, if the area you have in mind recently contained nightshade veggies like tomatoes or potatoes, you’d better pick a different spot.