The Right Way to Prune Your Raspberry Canes!

hey folks it's laura with rain tree nursery it's cold it's dark early it's around the time of halloween are you scared to prune your raspberries no i'm just joshing but we've been getting a lot of calls from our customers and they're concerned about winter pruning their raspberries they don't know how to do it they're afraid to cut too much and they're afraid to not cut at all what do you do we've got the answers now before i actually start cutting on anything i have two pieces of safety gear that i've got i've got my gloves and i've got a nice sharp pair of shears i always use gloves when i'm working with raspberries because although they are not thorny some varieties can have really firm stiff hairs and that bothers some people this is a completely hairless variety but if i've got my gloves on it doesn't matter what variety i'm working on i'm going to be comfy either way number two is a nice sharp pair of sheers i sharpen my shears several times a year i want to make very clean cuts on my raspberries raspberries can tend to have problems with fungal infections and a nice sharp clean cut means there's less surface area that could possibly be infected by some wandering spores so if you've got your gloves and you've got your sharp shears then you're ready to go the first order of business is to cut out all of the dead canes this is an example of a dead cane i know this cane is dead because the bark is peeling and the wood underneath the bark is brown there is no sign of life here so i'm going to cut this cane all the way down at the base and one third way that you can tell when a cane is dead is the interior of the cane is completely brown by taking out these dead canes we encourage more air flow into the whole system which keeps all the remaining canes happy and healthy here is an example of a cane that is still alive the bark on this cane is smooth it is not peeling it has kind of a lovely greenish amber color but what we see on this cane is that it already gave us its fruit at the top of the cane we don't have to keep this we can go ahead and prune this top off just like that and what will happen is we'll get a few more branches at these nodes right here you can see that these nodes are going to make side lateral branches and those lateral branches will give us a little bit more fruit now here's another example of a dead branch and a live branch side by side another way that you can tell what is a dead branch that needs to be removed completely is that you'll see the old lateral canes that gave you fruit last year that is a lateral branch and that is a whole dead cane now this one here is a live cane and you might think that this is a lateral branch but because it doesn't have any evidence of fruit i can actually see that this is a stem from a leaf that's fallen off so i don't want to cut this nice live cane but this dead cane with its exhausted side branches can come out i found an escapee raspberries are famous for trying to grow outside of the places where you want them to grow and so this is the edge of my raspberry bed it's just a plain old firewood and here's my path with wood chips and this is clearly outside the path so all i need to do is just cut it down low get it out of the way you can see this was a green cane it's not brown on the inside i could have kept it but it's just gonna continue to migrate sideways i don't want that so i cut it out don't feel bad about that this is the patch before pruning and here is what the patch looks like after pruning you can see there is a lot more space in here really great air i took the opportunity to take some of the canes that were straying and put them back inside the trellising and there's also lots of nice air for error for the strawberries that i have planted under these raspberries as well i did this pruning on a day that it wasn't raining and wasn't expected to rain for another day or two once again with raspberries being a little susceptible to mildew i want to do this on a dry day so that all these cuts can heal and this patch can rebound in the best way possible i have a nice big pile of cuttings right here and these are going to go either in the garbage or in a burn pile i would not compost them and put them back on the garden and there you have it from all of us here at rain tree nursery happy holidays we'll see you next time cut

Channel: Raintree Nursery

Views: 17,907

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Id: 7_jen97FjgQ

Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021