How should I prune my tayberries, wineberries and summer raspberries?

[Russel Sprout]

Hi all

I'm still quite new to this berry malarkey... I planted them in the winter of last year and so this year has been the first fruiting one. The tayberries are done fruiting and so all the "spent" canes have been removed from the base. The wineberries are nearing the end and so the same will happen to them. Summer raspberries have stopped fruiting too and so I'll remove the old canes there too.

My confusion is what to do with the new canes which will fruit next year. Some of the tayberry canes must be around 30 foot long! The wineberries are quite long too. I was all eager this morning and started to arrange all of these canes but it was a bit of a nightmare and my partner said it just didn't seem right. So we stopped, went indoors, and started to do some reading. It would seem she's right as most f what we read said that the canes should be pruned to anywhere between 2 and 5 foot, whilst the laterals should be pruned to 18" - 2 foot. Apparently this will help with yields and reduce the risk of some diseases, whilst also making them easier to manage.

So my first question is whether this is correct and we should follow this advice?

Secondly, a lot of the articles said this pruning should be done in early spring. But it seems daft to me to keep 30 foot canes over winter only to chop them right back to - say - 5 foot in 7 months time or so. So I'd also like to know when such pruning should be done?

Any other pruning or general berry tips would also be most helpful.

Many thanks

Max

[Thelma Sanders]

When I've cut the old canes and start to tie in the new growth, (have done loganberries today) I just cut it to easily fit the frame that is available for it. It seems the simplest way to me

[nickdub]

I've never read anything about pruning new growth helping with diseases on these fruit, sounds odd to me, I would rather bend the canes into a convenient shape, "S" for example, and then tie it up. Don't forget if you want to propagate new plants, bending the tips over and letting them root in the ground will often work fine.

[Russel Sprout]

Thanks for the replies. The opening paragraph of this article mentions diseases:

https://www.thespruce.com/pruning-ra...plants-1401962

I'm sure other articles I read said the same and can post the links if I come across them again.

I've also been watching a couple of videos on how to support cane berries (logan in the most recent one I watched), and they seemed to follow Thelma's method more; just pruning to fit the shape/length of the support. Otherwise, there was no mention of pruning.

As I'm reading through the stuff I was reading yesterday again today (because I'm still not sure what's best to do!), I noticed that a few of the articles were more specifically about thornless blackberries and I'm starting to wonder if that was an oversight on my part... I was aiming to cut the canes of my tayberry and wineberry plants to around 4/5 foot, but wonder now if that advice is for thornless blackberries only and not so relevant to tay and wineberries.

Ta

[nickdub]

Hi,
I had a look at the info in the link you provided. Re diseases its definitely the case that pruning out old canes completely helps to minimize the risk of diseases spreading - I think that's the main thing they're getting at. It's also the case of course that healthy plants are less disease prone, so if you had lots of canes coming up near one another, pruning a few out to let in more light and air would be worth doing - I'd say that would be more of an issue with long established plots than newish ones. I know some raspberries will throw canes 9 foot or more in height, and that very often people cut the tops off for convenience - personally I'd rather bend the tops over and tie them in, but that's just me, and mine never get that big anyway.

I'd be much more cautious taking growth off tayberries, blackberries and wineberries. These canes are usually v bendy, so as long as you train them as they grow over the summer you can pretty much get them to fit in to any shape you want. if there is insufficient room for them where they are I'd propagate new plants and put those somewhere with a bit more space, otherwise I think you will get less fruit than you could per plant.