Hi I'm Emmale Earnest and I work for University of Delaware Cooperative
Extension it's late March and it's time to prune the blueberries in our experimental
plot so I'm going to demonstrate how we do that!
So this variety here is blue crop which is a very commonly grown variety if you
have blueberries at home growing in your home gardener in your yard you can use
these techniques to make them more productive and help them to grow better.
So our goal is with pruning blueberries are to #1 encourage the new growth
that's coming up from the bottom from the ground these new canes that are
shiny and unbranched and don't have the rough gray bark on them. #2 we want to
reduce the number of flower buds and the flower buds are these big fat buds that
are at the tips of the branches - we can reduce the number of flower flowers and
the number of fruit without reducing yield because you will just get larger
blueberries--most people prefer those larger blueberries. So I am going to be
looking around in here and I'm going to start by taking out some of this small
growth at the bottom that I know that I don't want to keep so that I can see
better what's going on. And I'm also going to take out very low branches that
have flower buds on them because those those blueberries that grow down low
often don't get picked and they can harbor insects and diseases that you
don't want in your blueberries.
Okay now that I have this smaller stuff that I know I don't want out of the way,
then I am going to look for the three new canes that look really good and
healthy that I want to keep, and then I will prune out all the rest of the new
growth. If you have a five-year-old blueberry plant and you keep three new
canes each year then you should have about fifteen canes and that's about
where you want to stop so you want about 10 to 15 canes on your bush. So
this one I like here it's nice and tall and over here we have a new cane that
looks good and there's a nice one next to it but I'm going to take out the one
next to it because we don't want all of our new canes in the same spot. And all
right I'm going to keep the one next to this
right, so I'm going to prune out the ones the new canes that I'm not going to keep
for this year's three--and now I'm going to look for some older canes that I
don't want to keep the older canes are going to be the least productive and you
can tell which ones are the oldest by how twiggy they are. They might not
necessarily be the fattest canes because they may have grown when the plant was
smaller. So I'm looking for the ones that have the most twiggyness and this one is
going to come out see how Twiggy that is and
I'm going to take this one out here now we'll count and see how many we have [counting] 1, 2,
3, 4 ,5, 6, 7, 8, 9 ,10, 11, 12, 13, okay so we're in our range of 10 to 15 --I see a little
bit more small stuff that I need to take out there--and now I'm going to look down
from the top and try to make sure that my new canes that are coming up from the
bottom have space to grow and branch out and I'm going to cut some branches off
of the twiggier canes so that I'm reducing the number of flowers and the
number of fruit without reducing yield,
because I'm just going to have larger blueberries. Now I'm going to try to take
out anything that's sort of crossing over other branches or growing back into
the plant and not leaving a nice amount of light into the middle so that new
canes can come up. Alright, I'll just take off a few low things...
So I hope you find this useful and thanks for watching!