Pruning Raspberries In Spring: When And How To Do It Right

2024 Author: Bailey Albertson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 12:53

Pruning raspberries in spring: when and how to do it right

Spring is already full of hassle: taking care of seedlings, preparing beds, treating bushes and trees from pests and diseases, purchasing seeds, repairing greenhouses and building greenhouses. And it would be great to prune raspberries in the fall, or better - immediately after fruiting. But what if you forgot, didn't have time, couldn't? It must be cut.

Content

• 1 Timing of pruning raspberries in spring
• 2 Pros and Cons of Spring Pruning

• 3 Pruning remontant raspberries in spring

  3.1 Video: Thinning young offspring of remontant raspberries

• 4 Pruning regular non-refurbished raspberries

• 5 Caring for bushes after pruning

  5.1 Video: caring for raspberries in spring

Timing of pruning raspberries in spring

Perform spring pruning before bud break. As soon as the snow melted, the earth dried up, you can walk on it - it's time to get to work. Trimming raspberries with swollen and blooming buds is dangerous. By untangling and pulling cut shoots from the bushes, you can damage the buds that have begun to grow and bloom on the remaining ones.

Such tender shoots break off easily if the raspberry is disturbed after bud break

It is impossible to predict when trimming time begins and ends in dates, even within one region. For example, last year here, in Western Siberia, the spring was abnormally cold. The buds on trees and bushes did not bloom until early June. And this year I was able to walk around the site and not get bogged down in early April. Tulips and garlic have already sprung up, buds on currants and honeysuckle have swollen. We must hurry before the raspberries wake up.

If you live in the south, there is no snow, the site is accessible all year round, then shoots can be removed at any time before bud break, but at freezing temperatures. Even in mild frost, the stems become brittle and break easily. The purpose of spring pruning is to clear the raspberry tree of old, diseased and weak stems and thereby create favorable conditions for the development of the remaining, strongest, shoots. The yield of a well-groomed raspberry tree and the quality of the berries in it are noticeably higher than in the neglected, left to themselves.

Pros and cons of spring pruning

Pros of Spring Pruning:

• Even if you pruned the raspberries last season, in the spring you need to grab the pruning shears again to remove the branches broken by snow, as well as frozen tops. Autumn pruning has to be additionally adjusted, and in spring you can remove all unnecessary things in one go.
• In regions with harsh winters and little snow, spring pruning is recommended as it is not known which shoots will survive the winter. You can thin out the raspberries in the fall, and in the winter frost will complete your endeavor. As a result, little will remain of the bushes.

If you bend raspberries for the winter, cover them, they do not freeze, then it is better not to postpone pruning until next spring, but to do it at the end of summer, immediately after picking the last berries.

Cons of Spring Pruning:

• Pests and spores of pathogenic fungi live on old shoots. If they are not cut out immediately after fruiting, the parasites will move to the young, overwinter, and in the spring the entire raspberry tree will be infected.
• Pruning is done at the very beginning of spring and in a short time, when in most of Russia it is not so easy to get to the site, especially if it is located somewhere outside the city. Roads in horticultural societies are unpaved, washed out by melt water, and there is no traffic on them.

• When pruning ordinary non-repaired raspberries, it can be difficult to distinguish annual shoots from dry biennial ones, both species are similar in spring - they are covered with bark. In the summer of last season and until autumn, young shoots are easily distinguishable, they are still green, and the old ones are lignified.

  

  Immediately after fruiting, the shoots are easy to distinguish: old ones are brown, young ones are green, and in spring they are all brown

• In the spring, gardeners have a lot to do without raspberries. It is easier and faster to do light cosmetic pruning after the autumn than to cut the bushes thoroughly.

Spring pruning of remontant raspberries

Cut absolutely all last year's shoots flush with the ground. In this species, the berries are tied on the offspring of the current year, those that germinate in the spring and develop over the summer.

In remontant raspberries, absolutely all shoots are cut off, but hemp does not need to be left

The remontant raspberry also has a second stage of spring pruning. It is grown mainly in the south, and here already in May it is necessary to thin out root suckers. They can rise in a thick cap, press each other, those in the center will begin to stretch out, rot from dampness.

Young growth grows in place of the cut bushes, it needs to be thinned out

Schemes of spring thinning of remontant raspberries:

1. Tape method - shoots are located in a row along one line. You can leave 15–20 shoots per running meter, which means that the distance between two adjacent ones is 5–7 cm.

   

   The raspberry tree is formed according to the strip method: all shoots are located in one row

2. Bush method - raspberries grow in freestanding bushes. The distance between them is about 1 m, in each bush you can leave up to 10-12 shoots.

   

   Raspberries grow in free-standing bushes, each with several shoots

In both cases, keep the strongest, thickest and tallest stems with healthy leaves

Video: thinning young offspring of remontant raspberries

Pruning regular, non-refurbished raspberries

Common raspberries bear fruit on annual shoots that developed from the growth last year. If you did not prune in the fall, then in the spring there will be annuals with fruit buds in the bushes, and two-year-old branches that have already served their time. The latter must be cut out.

How to distinguish old shoots:

• They are branched, have lateral growths.
• Dry to the very bottom, break easily.
• The color of the bark is dimmer than that of live shoots, more often gray.
• The bark almost always cracks and flakes, especially at the bottom.

In the foreground are annual shoots, and behind them are visible old ones with gray peeling bark, from under which almost black wood peeps out

Stages of pruning non-repaired raspberries in spring:

1. Cut old, dry stems and broken stems close to the ground.
2. Thin the remaining annual shoots, removing all thin and short ones (below 120–150 cm).
3. As with the remontant raspberry, tidy up the planting in a ribbon or bush type.
4. Cut off the dried tops of the remaining shoots to a living bud. To make this work easier, first tie the raspberries to the trellis, and then cut the shoots, you can at the same level, about 1.5 m from the ground.

Pruning raspberries in three stages: A - remove old shoots, they have side branches, B - remove weak and short shoots, C - cut the tops to a living bud

The last point can be performed after bud break. Then you can easily determine: how to shorten the shoots to a live area. In any case, after the leaves appear, once again go to the raspberry tree with the pruner. In most cases, missing dried stems or tops are found, the buds on which have not woken up, they stand naked. Delete them.

Caring for bushes after pruning

Pruning is both an injury to the bush and a stimulus to growth. The roots are the same, but there are fewer shoots, the plant will begin to restore the aerial part with a vengeance. We need to help him with this:

• Remove clipped branches and fallen leaves from last year's raspberries. Take this waste to a trash can or incinerate.
• Spread nitroammophoska or other complex fertilizer for the garden under the bushes (about 1 tbsp. L. Under the bush or 1 running meter) and loosen the soil, mixing the granules with it. Can be fertilized with humus or compost - a bucket under a bush or per running meter for tape cultivation.
• If the ground is dry, water it.
• Mulch with old sawdust or dry grass.
• Shrubs, the ground under them, treat mulch against diseases with a fungicide (Bordeaux mixture, HOM, Skor, etc.), and against pests - with insectoacaricide (Aktara, Karate, Forsom, etc.). Carry out these treatments at temperatures above +10 ° C and not simultaneously, but at an interval of at least 2-3 days. In the case of remontant raspberries, immediately after cutting off all last year's shoots, spray the vacant area (ground, trellis, nearby fence) with a fungicide, and after regrowth of young shoots and thinning, treat them with insectoacaricide.

Video: caring for raspberries in spring

By pruning raspberries in spring, you stimulate the growth of strong shoots, which will definitely lead to higher yields. In addition, order in the raspberry-tree is a guarantee of his health.