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Pruning raspberries the right way and at the optimal time is essential if you want a bumper crop of large, juicy berries. The tools and techniques you choose to employ in your berry patch can help to spur new and very specific types of growth, as well as prevent the spread of diseases like anthracnose and blight, among others.
Whether you grow summer-fruiting raspberries, fall-bearing raspberries, or both, making a few strategic cuts can greatly improve the quality of your harvest. And if you train and trellis potentially unruly vines, this also can help your raspberry patch to bear fruit.
Why pruning raspberries is important
Pruning raspberries is important because, if left unchecked, plant growth becomes unwieldy, and the health of untrimmed plants also can suffer. The deliberate removal of certain canes allows more sunlight and fresh air to reach your plants. This, in turn, helps plants to dry more quickly after summer rains thereby reducing the chances of fungal diseases taking hold. It also affords insect pests less cover, so you can more easily find and remove them. Keeping only the most vigorous canes and giving them plenty of room to thrive can also contribute to an extra large crop.
Which type of raspberry are you pruning?
Raspberries are perennial, shrubby plants originating from roots and crowns. However, the woody stalks or “canes” that get sent up from the crowns are actually biennial. In other words, they’ll complete a two-year process and then they’ll be replaced with new canes. First year canes are called “primocanes.” Second year canes are called “floricanes.”
With that in mind, when and how you prune depends on the type of raspberries you’re growing. The two main types include:
- Summer-bearing raspberries: These provide one summer harvest. Their fruits form on the plants’ second year growth.
- Everbearing raspberries: These provide some fruits in early summer as well as a larger, fall crop. Everbearers can set fruit on the very ends of each primocane in late summer or early fall. Then, during the following summer, they’ll set fruit on what ultimately becomes their floricanes.
The best time of year for pruning raspberries
Most raspberry growers cut spent canes down to ground level once the harvest has ended and plants are dormant. Alternatively, you can wait until very late winter or early spring to prune. (Doing so affords plants extra time to redistribute nutrients and carbohydrates from dying floricanes back into their roots and crowns.)
Tools for pruning raspberries
These are a few of the things you’ll want to gather for your raspberry pruning.
- Protective gear: Because raspberry plants are studded with sharp thorns, pruning raspberries safely requires a little extra preparation and equipment. First, you should wear long pants and long sleeves and use a good pair of gardening gloves to guard against injury. I like my rose gloves because of the gauntlets that protect my wrists and arms.
- Cutting tools: While pruning shears are best for snipping through smaller, thin branches, loppers are great for heavier pruning jobs. You should carefully disinfect these tools before and after pruning raspberries.
- Dig it: Use a spade to dig up any volunteer raspberry plants you wish to move to a new raspberry planting bed or pot up for friends or neighbors.
Raspberry pruning step by step
When pruning raspberries, exactly what you cut away depends on the variety you’re growing and your specific goals. For instance, if you have everbearing plants and you want both a spring and a fall harvest, you’ll cut and remove spent floricanes completely while snipping just the tops from this year’s fruiting primocanes. (The portions of these primocanes left intact will produce fruit next year.)
If, instead, you want your everbearers to put out one main harvest, you can either cut all canes down to the ground or prune them as you would summer-bearing raspberries. (For summer-bearers, remove the spent floricanes.)
Step 1: Prune out dead or damaged canes
Removing damaged canes is critical when pruning raspberries since these can be disease vectors. You should also check cane tips for signs of winter injury and trim as needed. Examining your current season’s growth for mechanical damage (like that inflicted by errant string trimmers, insect feeding, and so on) and pruning accordingly helps, too.
Step 2: Remove the spent canes
Dried and brown, “spent” canes fruited last season and no longer serve a purpose. Cut them off at an angle close to the ground and dispose away from your raspberry patch. By removing these old floricanes, you’re making room for the new fruiting canes that will take their place.
Step 3: Prune for lateral branching
Have a clump of black raspberries? Both black and purple raspberries respond well to tip-cutting which forces canes to form lateral branches. These laterals produce more berries—and larger fruits—than canes which have not been tip-cut. When primocanes are about three feet long, simply snip their end (terminal) buds.
How often should you prune raspberries?
When it comes to plant health, regular raspberry pruning is as important as routine weeding, watering, and pest management. You should prune your raspberries at least once each year. Want to go above and beyond? You can remove any damaged or diseased canes you notice in between annual pruning sessions.
What about the new shoots?
Many varieties of red raspberries and yellow raspberries will put out new shoots or volunteer plants through suckers. You can separate these from the parent plant and use them to expand your raspberry rows or pot them up to give away. Just be sure to remove any extraneous new plants that are growing beyond the bounds of your raspberry area or that could otherwise steal resources from your main raspberry canes.
Training and trellising raspberry plants
Raspberry canes laden with fruit sometimes droop down to the ground. Not only can this cause your harvest to get muddy, but it also can increase the likelihood that your plants will contract a soil-borne disease. You can avoid this—and make crop harvesting much easier—by supporting plants with a permanent or semi-permanent trellis.
Start by delineating each of the four corners of your raspberry bed with a heavy-duty, metal stake or large wooden fence post. (For very long rows, you may need to add extra stakes every few feet.) Then, tie twine or attach trellis wires to the upright supports so that your plants are sandwiched between them. (If needed, you can also gently tie individual canes to supports to further train their new growth.)
The final cut
Once you know something about the gear you’ll need and the variety and type of raspberry plants you have, pruning raspberries is a snap. First, recall that there are two main kinds of raspberry plants—summer-bearing and everbearing. While summer-bearing fruits on the plants’ (second-year) floricanes, ever-bearing plants can set some fruit on both (first-year) primocanes and (second-year) floricanes.
Pruning raspberries properly entails removing dead or damaged canes and spent floricanes once your plants have gone dormant. Depending on your plant variety and goals, it may also mean trimming or removing primocanes as well. With regular annual pruning, you’re sure to enjoy both healthier growth in the berry patch and many bountiful harvests.
Watch a video about pruning dwarf raspberry bushes.
Learn more about caring for raspberries and other berry bushes
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