How To Prune Blackberry Bushes - A Guide To Better Yields!

blackberries we're not gonna be enjoying those delicious nutritious super foodalicious aggregate fruits for another six to seven months and if i don't do something with my blackberry patch now we won't be enjoying any at all flower buds form on the floricane or two-year shoots once they're done and they've produced those fruit for you they should be removed at the end of summer for the overall health of the patch for three years now i've let this blackberry bramble go wild to get fully established well now is the time to take back control this blackberry patch before it becomes more unmanageable than it already is so let's get to it [Music] pruning blackberry serves two purposes the annual cleanup cut keeps the overall health of your plants nice and high while also providing you with larger harvests once your blackberry patch is running like a well-oiled machine you should be pruning twice a year prune once at the end of summer to do the major cleanup of your blackberry patch and then once again in late winter to tip prune those one-year-old shoots to force more branching more fruit development prior to the spring bud burst now i've got blackberry patches on a few different spots on the property but these particular specimens here to get established have been allowed to go wild for the last three years so today we're actually going to do both types of pruning starting with a major cleanup prune the typical summer cleanup really just involves removing all the fluoricane shoots that is the shoots that have already flowered and already fruited for us this year easy enough and while we're here we can also remove any dead or dying branches as well as any excessively large suckers such as this one growing about 25 feet away from the main patch like we mentioned the maintenance or cleanup prune of your blackberry bush occurs at the culmination of fruiting at the end of summer now it'll be nowhere near as difficult or laborsome as what i'm doing here today but it is gonna comprise the bulk of the work that it takes to maintain a blackberry patch for this job you're gonna need a pair of thick gloves a sharp pair of pruners and possibly as we'll see later even a saw when you're doing this at the end of summer your shoots are going to be easier to see but still don't cut indiscriminately this year's fruiting canes the ones that haven't produced yet need to be left to grow all we want to do here is remove the old canes that have already fruited and dead or dying branches if you have a lot of smaller dead debris like i do here a hard rake can make quick work of cleaning out that underbrush significantly reducing your workload just be careful not to smoke your tripod while filming or do smoke it and keep working like a boss 20 minutes in and we've cleared out a 10 by 10 square area a long way to go for sure but what seemed insurmountable a half a heart ago now feels possible as we clear out the debris we start to see the fruit bearing shoots that we're gonna wanna keep again when you're doing this part at the end of summer they will be entirely easier to see to prevent any damage to them while i'm doing this kind of a cleanup i tie them together in groups of four to six at this stage of their life they're quite bendable but within reason tying them up like this is also going to make building the trellis far easier if you haven't yet built yours now the second type of pruning which is the type that we'd actually be doing right now is tip pruning to maximize flowering fruiting and harvest potential we tip cut the current year's fruiting canes to about 24 to 36 inches high doing so allows us to really get the most fruit out of the least amount of initial canes on your plant these canes are going to be super easy to spot because they should be the only living canes left after your summer cleanup again after you tip them to about two to two and a half feet in length go ahead and stake them to your trellis now or if you have to build one simply tie them together like we mentioned these guys are actually quite bendy think of it like a grapevine you can really start to mold these guys in any direction that you want them to grow which is handy super easy and it gets a lot of these guys out of your way so you're not breaking the branches you want to keep and you can see all the ones that you want to remove if blackberry bushes aren't kept in check more than any other crop they can really test your metal as a gardener but what you're seeing here in my patch today is worst case scenario with the summer maintenance prune you'll never be in this situation regardless this is a great benchmark as we can see that no matter how bad your patch is everything is fixable up until now i've only been cutting down last summer's floricanes and removing dead debris but being an older blackberry plant that hasn't been dealt with i know at the inner core i'm gonna find branches where even the best pruners can't handle the job you gotta earn your stripes when you're working with blackberries ouch hazardous work which should be more than enough motivation to maintenance prune every summer well it took about three hours but we did what we set out to do i was aiming to get four new established blackberry clumps off of this mess uh and i got three i got three really good ones um the fourth one there over on the east side it just wasn't good enough to keep so we'll be happy with these three and it should be more than enough blackberries for our family this year my only issue is now that i got these guys neat and tidy i need to build a trellis for them we'll save that for another day more pressing right now is this area is quite an eyesore seeing us for three years this ground has never seen the light because it was covered by a blackberry bush that was just going crazy not to mention for the last three hours you know i've been trampling around in here turning this into one big mud pit so let's go ahead and clean this area up and we'll call it a day i'm going to start by raking the area somewhat level this way we can apply first a ground cover and then a mulch normally people use a weed barrier or geotextile cloth but i'm really trying to minimize the plastic that i put in the ground on my farm on top of that i hope to eventually be running a small creek through this area you know using the natural slope of this land and i don't want anything in the ground that's gonna make digging that harder than it needs to be having said that this recycled craft paper will do just fine especially with four inches of bark mulch on top of it i always seem to do this on windy days which makes it a pain for one person still doesn't take long to do and the entire 400 square foot area only took me about 10 minutes unfortunately we have a u-bag landscape depot only five minutes from our house i've only got the little car today so it's most likely gonna be two trips i just have to rake it level and spread the mulch around mulch is great and it's going to do a few things it's going to prevent any new weeds from colonizing the fresh bare ground as well it's going to hold in moisture and mitigate any extreme temperatures that we may get like kramer says you got a mulch i know the area looks quite barren but once the daylilies sprout they take up a four foot radius on their own and the blackberries will easily cover the entire front of the bed super happy to get this and the grapevines done already and with the blueberries and strawberries finished in the fall the only berry left is the raspberries at the end of winter right before spring bud burst hard to imagine that this space looked like this just three hours ago blackberries are an amazing superfood full of nutrients and goodness that's out of this world now they aren't a maintenance free crop but done correctly and diligently twice a year you'll be swimming in fruit come summertime and actually you'll find that the amount of work per pound of food that these guys produce is a lot less than other crops hey if you have any other blackberry growing tips that you'd like to share with the community leave in the comments down below also if any of you are on facebook head on over and join our gardening group called growing better the group has grown phenomenally fast yet it will never lose its sense of community or its welcoming feel if you're passionate about growing epic organic fruits herbs and veggies for you and your family the growing better group is a great place to hang out share learn and grow hey thanks for watching guys if you're getting value in this and the other series that i'm doing on youtube hit those like share and subscribe buttons if you'd be so kind and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: The Ripe Tomato Farms

Views: 42,658

Keywords: blackberries, blackberry, pruning blackberries, how to prune a blackberry bush, how to prune a blackberry vine, how to prune blackberries, growing blackberries, how to grow blackberries, gardening, winter gardening, winter garden maintenance, winter garden maintenance tips, pruning, production, berry, the ripe tomato farms

Id: mnoPVZ64CMo

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021