Home » Misc » Raspberry bushes trimming

Raspberry bushes trimming


How And When To Trim Raspberry Bushes

Raspberries

By: Nikki Tilley, Author of The Bulb-o-licious Garden

Image by popovariel

Growing raspberries is a great way to enjoy your own tasty fruits year after year. However, in order to get the most from your crops, it’s important to practice annual pruning raspberry pruning. So how do you prune raspberry bushes and when? Let’s find out.

Why You Should Prune Raspberry Plants?

Pruning raspberry bushes improves their overall health and vigor. In addition, when you prune raspberry plants, it helps increase fruit production. Since raspberries grow only foliage the first season (year) and flowers and fruit the next (second year), removing dead canes can make it easier to obtain a maximum yield and berry size.

When to Trim Raspberry Bushes

How and when to prune raspberries depends on the type you are growing.

How Do You Prune Raspberry Bushes?

Again, pruning techniques depend on variety. Red raspberries produce suckers at the base of previous season’s growth while black (and purple) form on new growth.

Red Raspberry Bush Pruning

Summer-bearing – Remove all weak canes to the ground in early spring. Leave 10 to 12 of the healthiest canes, about ¼ inches (0.5 cm.) in diameter, with 6 inch (15 cm.) spacing. Tip prune any that may have suffered cold damage. Following summer harvest, prune off the old fruiting canes to the ground.

Fall-bearing – Fall-bearing can be pruned for either one crop or two. For two crops, prune as you would summer-bearing, then again after the fall harvest, pruning to the ground. If only one crop is desired, there’s no need to prune in summer. Instead, cut all canes to the ground in spring. There will be no summer crop, only one in fall using this method.

Note: Yellow varieties are also available and their pruning is the same as for the red types.

Black or Purple Raspberry Bush Pruning

Remove fruiting canes after harvest. Tip prune new shoots in early spring 3 to 4 inches (8-10 cm.) to encourage branching. Top these canes again 3 to 4 inches (8-10 cm.) in summer. Then after harvest, remove all dead canes and those smaller than ½ inches (1 cm.) in diameter. The following spring, prune out weak canes, leaving only four to five of the healthiest and largest. Cut back the lateral branches of black varieties to 12 inches (31 cm.) and purple types to about 18 inches (46 cm.).

This article was last updated on

Did you find this helpful? Share it with your friends!

How to Prune Raspberries - FineGardening

Left unpruned, red raspberries are their own worst weed. When canes get overcrowded, they compete for sunlight, causing the shaded leaves and buds on the lower half of the plant to die. Without those buds, you’ll have fewer fruiting branches and a much smaller crop.

Crowded canes (photo above) also compete for nutrients and water, which leads to small, poor-tasting fruit. And the shady, moist conditions around a dense thicket are a magnet for fungal diseases, such as gray mold, spur blight, and anthracnose.

Pruning is the most effective way to avoid these headaches. A yearly thinning allows plenty of sunlight and air to penetrate the bramble (as in the photo below), which means you’ll have bigger, healthier crops and a much easier time picking those sweet red berries.

Before you start, know your primocanes from your floricanes

To prune any plant properly, you need to understand its growth cycle. In the case of red raspberry, the roots and crown are perennial but the canes are biennial (they live for only two years). The first year, they emerge as green primocanes and form fruiting buds. If you have a summer-bearing variety, these buds won’t flower until the following year. If you have an ever-bearing variety, the buds at the tips of your primocanes will give you a small fall crop, and the buds lower on the canes will remain dormant until next season. As winter nears, primocanes drop their leaves and develop a thin brown bark.

In their second year, the canes are called floricanes. The previous year’s buds grow into fruiting branches and bear a summer crop. As their berries ripen, floricanes begin to senesce. Their leaves turn red or yellow, and they die as winter approaches. A big part of pruning a red raspberry is getting rid of these spent floricanes. To keep your plants from getting unruly during the growing season, cut back any new canes that emerge outside the desired row width of 2 feet; however, don’t touch the new green shoots growing within the prescribed row width. It’s not until late winter that you prune the entire plant.

In fall, resist the temptation to cut out the dying flori­canes that fruited that summer. Research conducted at Cornell University indicates that these canes send carbohydrates to the crown and roots well into early winter, helping the plant survive dormancy.

Four simple steps to pruning raspberries

Illustration: Judy Simon

1. Remove last year’s canes
The first step of the late-winter pruning process is to remove all of last year’s spent floricanes. By removing these dead canes, you prevent disease spores from overwintering on them and spreading to new canes. Floricanes have peeling gray bark and old fruiting lateral branches on them. Cut all of these dead canes right to the ground.

2. Narrow the row
The recommended row width is 1½ to 2 feet. Prune to the ground any canes that are growing outside of this perimeter. It doesn’t matter how nice a cane looks; if it’s out of bounds, cut it off. Keeping the rows narrow is critical for preventing disease and making fruit easy to reach during harvest time.

3. Cut out the weaklings
Go into the plant row, and cut out any canes that appear weak, spindly, or short or that are showing obvious symptoms of insect injury or disease. The final cuts are thinning cuts. All that you want to have remaining in the row are the tallest, thickest, healthiest-looking canes. Continue to cut away the less vigorous canes, and space out the ones you plan to keep. Make sure that the canes aren’t so close together that they will crowd and shade each other. You’ll know that you are finished pruning when the raspberry planting has only three to five canes per linear foot. This should look drastically thin to you.

4. Attach canes to a trellis
There are a number of different trellis styles, but I like V-trellises best for red raspberries (see photos below). In this design, two parallel wires, spaced 3 feet apart, run along the outside of your row of raspberries. The wires are attached to support posts at each end and set about 4 feet off the ground.

Attach each cane to a wire using twine, twist ties, tomato ties, or rubber bands. (Make sure that the ties you use are easy to take off. The primocanes you tie to the wire this year will be the spent floricanes you’ll need to remove next year.) Tie the canes so that roughly half of them are on one side of the row and half are on the other side. Because the row is only 1½ to 2 feet wide at its base and you are spreading the canes out to 3 feet wide on the trellis wires, the row of canes will form the shape of a V. This opens up the center of the row to improve light penetration and air movement, thus inhibiting the growth of fungal diseases and encouraging new canes to grow in the center of the row, rather than along the outside edges. Furthermore, this trellis method puts the fruiting canes on the outside and keeps most of the new canes on the inside of the row, which makes for easier harvesting and less wasted fruit.

Once you’ve tied each cane to a wire, gather all of the cut canes and dispose of them. Leaving them at the foot of your plants attracts diseases and pests.

What about black raspberries?

The canes of black raspberry are biennial, just like those of red raspberry. But because black raspberry’s growth habit is different, this plant requires an extra pruning step.

The canes of black raspberry tend to grow longer than those of red raspberry. The tips of the canes arch down to the ground and form their own roots, essentially creating new plants. While this makes black raspberry easy to propagate, it also leads to overcrowding. The other major difference is that the primocanes of black raspberry develop side shoots or branches, which only develop on the floricanes of the red variety. These shoots form buds that will bear fruit the following year. To encourage more fruit-bud development and prevent the cane tips from rooting, you should tip the primocanes of black raspberry in summer before they get too tall. When the canes reach about 30 inches long, simply cut off the top 2 to 3 inches of stem growth. This will encourage more side shoots and fruit buds as well as keep the canes at a more workable height. In late winter, prune the canes as you would for red raspberry.

Note: Although you can train black raspberry on a V-trellis, a single-wire trellis will better accommodate the plant’s branching habit.

Proper pruning of raspberry bushes for the winter will facilitate the harvest of a rich harvest

Foreword

Pruning of raspberry bushes for the winter is necessary for a simple reason - late young sprouts do not have enough time to get stronger before winter. So that they do not take away vital forces from the rest of the plant, they are removed. And not only them.

Everyone knows such a very tasty and beautiful berry as raspberries. But very few have seen her grow. And even fewer people know how to grow it, and what needs to be done so that raspberries are not only tasty, but also so that the raspberry crop is large and healthy. Raspberries do not grow on a tree, like sea buckthorn; not on bushes, like currants or gooseberries, and not near the ground, like other forest berries, for example, strawberries or blueberries.

It can be forest and garden. There are many varieties of raspberries bred by humans specifically to increase the size of the berries and improve the flavor. It is about such a garden raspberry that grows in the garden of every villager and, almost, in every dacha, and will be discussed in our article. Raspberries love care like any living creature and plant. In order for it to bear fruit better, it is necessary not only to feed it, weed it, but also to trim the stems every autumn.

Careful pruning of raspberries is done every autumn to protect the plant from wasting nutrients and to prevent the bush from becoming too dense. Completely very young sprouts that have sprouted by the end of summer are cut out and removed. We leave in the bush only the most powerful strong sprouts, approximately 5-10 pieces.

Pruning raspberries for the winter will rejuvenate raspberries

Many people think how to cut raspberry bushes? Yes, simple. There is nothing difficult in this. We start with the simplest. We take an ordinary pruner, preferably a small one, and cut off the old lignified stems at the root, which have already given us their fruits and will simply dry out by spring. We leave young and strong, from which next summer we will wait for the harvest.

Proper pruning of raspberries for the winter is not to remove the good desired young stems and not to leave the old ones to dry out. You need to carefully examine them, then you will be able to distinguish those that bear fruit.

Some gardeners unknowingly cut all raspberries completely under the root, because they think that many varieties begin to bear fruit in the first year of life. And, in the spring, sprouted sprouts from sleeping buds will already give their harvest. But raspberries have a two-year life cycle. The crop appears on two-year-old stems.

If your raspberries have been growing for a long time, or you bought a plot with a raspberry that is many years old, then it is easier for you to simply thin out this raspberry, rejuvenate, bring it to a decent state.

How to properly cut raspberries so that the harvest will please you

You just need to put on not very new clothes that you will not be sorry to tear, get dirty, and, with a pruner at the ready, get down to business:

  1. root, they are thicker, lignified, they do not need to be pitied.
  2. Then we cut out the small shoots that appeared at the end of summer. These stems are very weak, they will not have time to grow and get stronger before the onset of cold weather. We also do not regret them and cut them to the root.
  3. Next, we will cut the roots, which very often spread in all directions and fill the area with raspberries. To prevent this from happening, the raspberries must be monitored, and the roots cut off every year so that they do not fill the excess territory with the stems. We do this with the help of an ordinary bayonet shovel, which we stick into the ground around each raspberry bush in a circle at a distance of at least 30 cm from the bush. By this we cut off the roots from the rhizome, as a result of which they will die after the subsequent digging of the soil around the bush. Raspberry roots grow deep into the soil, up to about 30 centimeters.
  4. On the same segment (a plot of about a square meter is obtained around the bush), we select several stems, 5-10 pieces, stronger and stronger, which we will leave for the next fruiting. After that, we dig up the earth around the circle so that the extra roots that go beyond our border die. We also cut and dig all the other raspberry bushes to a depth of at least 30 cm.
  5. If the raspberry is old, growing in one place for many years, it can be rejuvenated even more. To do this, you need to dig out the center in the old bush, along with the roots under it. This accelerates the growth of young shoots from the roots remaining in the soil. They are much less damaged by pests and diseases. Young stems give a much better yield.
  6. Don't forget to feed the raspberry bushes in spring. You can scatter rotted manure and peat, humus around the territory of the raspberry forest, or use top dressings sold in any summer cottage store. If there is fresh manure, this can be done in the fall. Raspberries, like all plants, will respond to these actions with a noticeable increase in the yield of berries.

In the spring, you will also have to finish trimming the raspberries a little. Here we already cut off frozen, damaged or dried stems. We do pruning, while not forgetting how to properly trim raspberries, i.e. you still need to cut the tops of the stems to the first large healthy bud, by about 15-20 centimeters.

So that raspberries do not grow all over the plot and so that you less often have to chop off their roots around the rhizome, it is easier when planting new roots along a row of freshly planted raspberries to dig the remains of slate or metal into the ground to a depth of 40 cm to limit the area of ​​\u200b\u200bdistribution. And if you do this on both sides of each row, then you will not know grief with this.

Double pruning of raspberries to increase yield

In addition to the usual pruning, there is also a double pruning of raspberries. It is so called because young shoots that have grown up to 1 meter can be pinched. After pinching, their upward growth will stop for 1.5-2 weeks. After such pruning from each bud, from the axils of the leaves, new young shoots will go, that is, in addition to the main group of buds, a daughter group, younger, will be obtained. It will significantly increase the yield of berries on the bush.

In order to avoid thickening of the raspberries after this, the distance between the stems should not be less than 30 centimeters. The second pruning is done next spring. At the same time, we are already shortening those shoots that have grown after our first pruning, i.e. from the leaf axils. We shorten to the first large (well developed) kidney.

Pruning black raspberries is also necessary

To learn how to prune raspberries for the winter, red or black, you need to read the article carefully. Black raspberries (blackberries) require more careful handling and are much more difficult to process. It has more frequent and sharp spines. In order not to tear off her hands and clothes about her, it is better to start by tying the stems to supports, pegs.

In spring, if we plant young blackberry shoots, we first need to cut them to 20 cm. In autumn, black raspberry pruning consists only of cutting off very thin tops. In the second year, we remove the old trunks completely, and the young ones remain in the center of each bush. This raspberry is updated from the inside of the bush, and we remove the outer obsolete stems. This makes pruning blackberries very easy. In the spring, it remains only to cut the young shoots at the roots and cut off the extra shoots.

Pruning raspberries not only increases the yield of berries, but also gives you the opportunity to enjoy the outdoors. After such work, by burning the cut stems, you will get some ash to fertilize the beds. That's how many pluses from one pruning of raspberries for the winter.