Blueberry Pruning Demonstration

[Music] [Music] I'm John Strang with the university Kentucky College of Agriculture I'm an extension horticulturist and we're going to talk about pruning High Bush and Southern High Bush blueberries here these are the ones that are best adapted to Kentucky these are perennial plants and they can last 30 or 40 years without any problem if they're taking uh if they have a a good care um blueberries are a very hearty plant and typically we see very little injury on blueberries so that means we can prun prune blueberries anytime during the winter that it's above freezing we don't like to prune when it's below freezing it's a little harder on the wood uh blueberries produce their fruit in buds uh on the terminal part of the chots uh this is a nice Chute right here and you can see these big fat buds up here are the flower buds these little ones down here are the leaf buds the big fat flower buds have uh typically four 68 uh maybe 12 or 14 flowers in each one so there's a lot of potential for blueberries there uh the big wood is what produces the biggest blueberries the little tiny wood down inside the plant here is not good for producing blueberries a lot of these little tiny buds will only have one or two berries per bud so we tend to take some of those off uh in a blueberry plant we want a series of canes coming up we want several old canes and we want a number of new canes coming up to keep that bush vigorous and productive uh we've got a real old cane right here that uh has some flower buds on but it's just not very vigorous so uh we try to take these out as close to the ground as we can to get those out of there and I'm going to take several out of this Bush uh blueberry varieties differ in the uh number of canes they produce this one has produced a fair number of canes and it has a range of young and older canes and we're just getting the older ones out uh some bushes don't seem to want to put up younger canes and those have to be pruned a little heavier uh generally when a cane gets to be about an inch in diameter its efficiency goes down like this one and it's not very productive so these are the ones that we're trying to take out right now uh we really don't want more than about 10 canes in a bush so I'm taking quite a few out of this one this one's been let go for a little while uh since blueberries are perennial bushes uh you've got to realize that if you over fruit them one year you're not going to get as much fruit the following year so pruning is a balancing process in the bush to uh moderate fruit production over several years now here's a nice example of a Cane it's getting a little old this is weak maybe a little bit dead there's some Deadwood right there so we want to get any dead wood out and uh we've got a nice cane down here this a vigorous one so we'll cut that back to that uh uh vigorous cane and I'm going to cut that a little bit closer so I don't leave a stub right there okay here's one that's a little older one we'll cut back to the more vigorous cane uh there's another one that's pretty weak so that's going to have to go so we've got uh 1 2 3 4 5 six we've got way too many canes still this is a cane That's laying out here that's getting a little low uh some blueberries tend to spread out some of them tend to grow more erect and so the ones that are spreading out you try to get them to stand up the ones that are more erect we tend to try to open the center of the Bush up a little more this one's kind of weak what I mean when I'm kind of weak is uh we don't have very long Chute growth these are little tiny Twiggy sorts of choots right here as opposed to something like this which is real good fruit producing wood so we've done quite a bit on this Butch to thin it it out and we're going to try to get it back into its uh original Crown shape let's see here I'll take a few of these little weaker ones out we like to try to cut these stubs as close to the ground as possible to get rid of uh dead and diseased wood now we're getting this down to uh to size a little bit it's maybe got a few more canes than we had but you notice we've reduce the uh uh number of canes considerably and we've got it down to uh the younger canes that are have the good fruit producing wood on now we come in and we cut a lot of these little Twiggy ones out of here and this takes a a little time uh here's a little bit of a dead stub right there we tend to get canker disease in blueberries and so uh uh we want to get that pruned out and get rid of that and we're going to try to get rid of a little bit of this Twiggy wood in here uh weak plants are pruned much harder than vigorous plants uh by pruning a weak plant a little a little more we'll get more growth the next year and bring the Vigor back up on the plant of course fertilization has a big effect on the on the growth of the blueberry plant and uh typically we fertilize at Bloom and about 6 weeks after bloom uh you may have some blueberries and they may not be growing in at all and that could be due to too high a soil PH these require a real low soil pH of 4.5 to about five and if the pH is not down in in that range they're just not going to grow so uh check your pH if your blueberry plant isn't growing a classic uh uh uh example of having too high a pH is the leaves will be yellowish with with a dark green vation and uh there's a weaker one up top there we'll cut back to the more vigorous ones and that's about it for that blueberry plant we've still left quite a bit of fruit on that plant that's a little bit weaker but we've thinned it out and this should force this plant to grow more vigorously in the coming year and keep our production up

Channel: University of Kentucky Horticulture

Views: 92,380

Keywords: UK, University of Kentucky, College of Agriculture, Extension, Fruit, Blueberry, Pruning, Blueberry pruning, green, agriculture, demonstration, educational, berry, production, Kentucky, ukrec, plant, Edible landscape, landscape, garden, home, farming, horticulture

Id: a_GQI7ROac0

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2012