Recent posts in a question and answer column in another newspaper asked how to revive or rejuvenate a patch of black raspberries that were in rapid decline. The short answer is that you can't.Black raspberries are perhaps the most difficult common plant to grow successfully. Expected life span of a garden patch of black raspberries may be as little as several years and almost never more than five. The culprit is virus.

Signs of the virus include stunted plants, swiveled fruits and yellow or dying stems. There is no spray, fertilizer or cultural practice that can eliminate the virus and turn around a patch that is virus infected. At best we can offer a few tips that will delay the inevitable.

Start with clean plants. Commercially available plants are grown from tissue culture and generally virus indexed. Let's try an adequate, but over simplified, explanation of that last sentence.

One can assume that the newest growth on a plant has the least exposure to the virus. Thus, the process is to harvest a small section of the newest growth and in lab conditions grow new plants from it. That's tissue culture.

Repeating that process a number of times is indexing, and should produce a plant near virus free. The optimum word here is near. Taking suckers from your own or a friend's garden will start you much closer to the end as these plants are already somewhat infected.

If you are planting, select a new site well away from any previous black raspberry beds. It is also essential to destroy any wild plants growing in the area as they surely harbor the virus. Also, if you see a plant in decline, remove and destroy it immediately.

I am puzzled that there seems to be some wild bushes that thrive and that the plant people have not been able to use them better make the leap to better black raspberry plants.

You may have spotted that I always have used black in front of raspberries. Red raspberries are easy and almost foolproof as a crop with a bit of attention to pruning.

Blueberries are easy too, if one can get the pH low enough in our limestone soils. They are multiple stemmed. Maintenance suggests keeping five to seven stems and removing the oldest stems each winter.

Last spring I planted several short rows of strawberries in my garden. One was my favorite spring bearer but the other was one of those ever-bearing varieties. Their fruit is not as tasty but you canŐt beat finding several quarts of strawberries in the garden in late September.

Grandson Liam likes to visit there. It takes almost a dozen berries until he exclaims that his belly is full. Speaking of Liam, his pumpkin got a blue ribbon at the fair and his new sister waited until two days after the fair to arrive.

All is well. I don't like black raspberries and my wife can satisfy her cravings with a few wild bushes along the fence row and an occasional purchase.