19 Jan 2007 - Into battle - pruning blackberries

I was watching a gardening programme on TV recently when I heard the presenter say that plants didn’t fight back. I don’t think the person uttering this phrase can have ever pruned blackberry canes - a very necessary although deadly task and not for the faint hearted.

 

Blackberries fruit on last season’s growth and having fruited the canes don’t crop well in subsequent years. If blackberries are left without pruning then they quickly run amok and create an impenetrable thicket. Also the plant puts effort into growing canes rather than fruit.

 

 

Most people will recommend that you prune brambles straight after pruning but I prefer to leave it until later in the year when the canes are more or less bare of leaves and it is easier to see where you are going. I have been pruning in winter for several years now and have had bumper crops so it can’t be doing any harm.

 

During the growing season strong new canes will begin to grow and at this point I select a few strong canes for next season’s fruit and cut out any others. If you leave all the new canes to grow on you will have far too many to cope with and I think it also means that effort that I want to go into producing fruit, goes into growing on the canes.  The canes selected are tied together to keep them tidy.  Well as tidy as you can keep a blackberry – tidy enough to stop it grabbing out at us when we walk by.

 

Preparing for pruning is a bit like going into battle and you do need to ensure that you are adequately protected before you start. I usually prefer to wear a long sleeved fleece, as it is a bit easier to disentangle from the vicious thorns than a woollen sweater, which would be ripped to shreds.  We did try growing a thorn-less variety but this didn’t seem to fruit anything like as well or produce as large a fruit as its thuggish relative and eventually it reverted and grew thorns anyway. I’m not sure what variety our blackberry, it was given to us by another plot holder when we first started on the plot over twenty years ago.

My method of pruning is to cut all the canes that have fruited and any thin and weedy growth to ground level.  My blackberry is very vigorous so usually I also need to cut out some of the new canes. The canes selected for growing on are then tied in to the support. We grow our canes up a wire fence. (This has been supporting the bramble for over twenty years and is becoming a bit loose and shaky but it still seems to be doing its job. Maybe one day we will get round to replacing it with something more aesthetically pleasing). I spread out the retained canes, tie them to the support and wind them in and out of the fence and then look forward to next year’s bounty, a plentiful supply of large juicy berries to keep our freezer supplied, as well as some to give away to friends and relations and also leave enough for and birds or other wildlife that enjoys the fruits too.  Looking at the photograph maybe I also need to buy some less obtrusive string next year!

 

 

We also have what we think is a loganberry or a tayberry - shown below- (how can I tell the difference?) – inherited from the previous plot holder which I prune in the same way, although I do tend to prune this straight after it has fruited as its position means that I have to keep it under stricter control!

 

 

If you have any suggestions for how I tell whether I have a tayberry, a loganberry or something else similar please post a comment on the blog - click here