David Handley: I'm David Handley with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.
And today, we're going to talk about pruning raspberries. Now, the proper time to prune
raspberries is really any time after they go dormant. So, this can happen at any time
from November right through March. Personally, I prefer to do it in the late winter/early
spring in March. This is because as the older canes are dying, they're sending sugars and
carbohydrates and nutrients back down to the root system, which will help next year's canes
get through the winter. Now, when we're pruning raspberries, we're
looking to accomplish three things. We can do them at the same time, but I'll lay them
out for you. The first is that we're going to narrow up the row because every year the
raspberries rows tend to get wider and wider. And you want to narrow that row up to about
two feet to about one and a half feet wide. The second thing we want to do is get rid
of all of the canes that fruited last year. These are called spent floricanes fruiting
canes that have already fruited. These canes are dead. They're just getting in the way
and taking up space. So, all of those are going to come out.
Then, the final thing we're going to do is thin the remaining canes such that there's
only three or four canes per linear foot. OK. So, this is going to look very thin when
we're all done. And we're going to be taking up the majority of the canes that you see
here now. As you approach the planting, you'll notice
there are really three kinds of canes that you're dealing with. First, are those spent
floricanes that we talked about. These have gray peeling bark. And they also have these
remains of little branches on them that we call the fruiting laterals. Any cane that's
showing this gray peeling bark and has these old fruiting shoots on them should come out.
These canes are dead anyway. When you cut into them, you'll see there's nothing but
brown wood in there. There's no green tissue, living tissue, at all. All of these come out.
The next type of cane you'll run into are a lot of weak spindly canes, very thin, very
short, they don't reach the trellis wires, which we'll see in a minute. These just aren't
going to produce very good fruit. If they're thin and short like this, all of these should
come out as well. Finally, and hopefully, we're going to have
a good selection of nice thick fruiting canes. These, if you peel the bark back a little
bit, you'll see they have green shoots. You'll notice that instead of the shooting laterals
that we saw in the spent floricanes, these just have buds. Now, in the springtime, these
buds are going to break and give us fruiting shoots. And that's our crop for that next
year. So, this is what we want to keep. And we want
to look for the thickest basal diameter, in other words, the thickest stems and good height,
OK, so that they'll reach the trellis wire and we can attach them. So, these are the
ones we want to save as long as they are within that two foot width perimeter that we've set
up for ourselves. Now, you can see here, here's a raspberry
row. This variety happens to be Boyne, one of my favorite varieties. And you can see
the row width here has gone out to three, even four feet, even though we started with
a row that was only a couple of feet wide. And that's because the new shoots, as they
came up during the summer were looking for light and less competition.
So, they're getting here. We don't want them. If we allow these canes to go ahead and leaf
out next year, they're going to be shading out all the canes in the middle. And I'll
have lots of fruit rot problems. And I won't want to have to reach in there through all
these thorny canes to harvest that fruit. So, I'll loose a lot of it.
So, initially, using some nice, sharp loppers, and some good thick gloves, because these
are thorny and I always like to wear safety glasses because these are thorns and they're
sticks running around your face all over the place, we can get started just cutting them
right at the base. And, as you're cutting, you can just pull those canes that you've
cut out of the way, throw them into the row, middle, so that you can collect them later.
We're not going to leave these behind because these can be a source of disease problems
for us next year. So, everything we've cut out, when we're all done, is going to be dragged
out of here and either chopped up and put into the compost pile, or burned, or taken
to the local dump, but not left here. OK. Now, that we've got this row pruned, you
can see how narrow the base is. We're trying to keep that row width at the base about to
a foot and a half to two feet wide. And then, you can see our trellis wires at about four
feet, are spread to about three and a half feet wide. And what we're going to do with
the nice canes that we left behind is attach them to this trellis wire.
Now, what you use to attach them is really whatever works best for you. Old bread twist
ties work pretty well, just take that cane, wrap the twist tie around it, and get it on
fairly tight so that the wind is not going to be able to blow it around too much.
There are some other things you can buy that have recently become popular here, some little
rubber bands with a little T on the end of them that can be used. And, in this case,
you just grab it. Bring the rubber band around. And that little T just grabs the other end
of the rubber band. So, that holds fairly well. It works better on thicker canes.
If you're a home gardener and like to grow vegetables, you're probably familiar with
different types of tomato clips. These are just little plastic rings that you can use
to clip plants on. And these will also work fairly well. We just take a cane, clip both
the wire and the cane and leave it there. And that's just so that the cane can't be
allowed to bounce back into the middle. And also, we have machines that'll do this
for you. These are called tapeners. And, in this case, you just grab the cane and you
put a little piece of plastic over it. And it works like a staple gun. You just grab
that, and then a staple clips it, releases it, and gives you a little piece that holds
on to the cane pretty well there. These are fast and relatively efficient, but you have
to buy a lot of tape and a lot of staples for them. And, because they're plastic, they
will be here for a long time. Remember, we're going to take these off next year after these
canes are fruited because we'll be pruning them out. And you'll have lots of little bits
of plastic to deal with. So, one way to get around that is to use the
old fashioned method which is just using some bailing twine or cotton string, whatever is
available to you, and just taking the cane, spreading them to the wire, and just giving
them a simple knot, either a slip knot or a granny knot or a square knot, anything works
pretty well just grab both the cane and the trellis wire. And what I like about these
is that you can get it fairly tight. It's fast if you fill your pocket full of little
bits of string cut to eight or 10 inches. And then, next year, when I'm going to prune
this out, I can just clip this off with a pair of scissors and it will fall to the ground.
It will bio degrade. I don't have to worry about plastic all over the place.
Now, the idea here is we're going to attach all of these to the trellis wire to spread
these canes out such that, here, we're going to have them spread out to three feet at the
base or a foot and a half. When, we're all done, we should have a nice V effect that's
going to allow the sun to come down and provide plenty of light and air movement through this
planting to make sure that we're not going to have a lot of disease problems.
The other thing this is going to do is put all of our fruiting canes on the outside.
And then, our new canes that'll fruit next year are going to be coming up in the middle
where we want them, and we won't have to fight our way through those thorny primocanes to
get to our fruiting canes. So, let's tie these up and take a good look at what the finished
product should look like. You can see we finished pruning. We've left
only the primocanes from last year. We've taken out all those dead floricanes. We've
removed all the scrawny growth. We've narrowed up the base of the plant so that, the row
planting, so we're only about two feet wide at the base and we spread them out to about
three feet up towards the tops of the canes. So, if you look down the row, you see we have
this lovely V effect. And that's just what you want to see in a raspberry planting.
Now, I like to leave the tops on. Some people like to ask, shouldn't I tip the raspberry
planting and cut the tips off? Well, the fact is that if you do that, you're cutting off
all these buds that are going to be fruiting laterals for you next year. If your canes
are so tall that you're not going to be able to reach them, when they're going to bend
over the wire, you can trim back a little bit. Just remember this rule of thumb, if
you cut off more than 25 percent of the cane tip, you're seriously reducing your yield.
So our planting is good to go. We're all set for the winter. And we're going to have a
real good crop on this for next year, and we'll be ready to set up for a good summer
of raspberries. [music]