How To Prune Your Blackberry Bushes (& The Best Time To Do It)

Along with weeding, mowing, and regularly tending to your garden and flower beds, pruning is another mandatory task and one of the avoidable errors that'll save your blackberries. Pruning can help shape the plant, increase air flow, and allow more sunlight to reach the foliage. Blackberry bushes benefit from pruning because they can get out of hand quickly if they're left untended throughout the year. How you prune your blackberry bush is dependent on the season. You can either prune them all the way down to the ground during winter or shape and clean them up during spring. Pruning your blackberry bushes will reduce pests, prevent disease or keep it from spreading, increase the yield of blackberries it produces, and keep it attractive and manageable throughout the year.

Whether you have thorned or thornless bushes, the way you prune and care for a blackberry plant is essentially the same. However, when dealing with thorny bushes, you will want padded gloves and a thick outer layer covering your arms for protection. For trailing blackberry bushes, cut the main cane back to 3 or 4 feet tall. Pruning during summer and fall is mostly about maintaining your blackberry bushes' height, density, and removing any dead parts of the cane after harvesting. Winter is the most common time to prune them back, oftentimes cutting them to the ground with the exception of four to six canes per plant. It's not good for your blackberry bush to be overgrown, and thinning it out allows it to focus on sending energy to the existing branches and producing more fruit.

Before pruning, it's important to know the difference between the two types of canes on your blackberry bush. Primocanes are first-year canes. They are bright green and bendy, and everbearing varieties flower and bear fruit at their tips. Floricanes are second-year canes. They are very sturdy and a dark brown or red color. All blackberry bush floricanes die after they flower and produce berries. This is important for avoiding mistakes while pruning your plants because you don't usually want to cut off the primocanes, with the exception of cutting off their spent berry ends after harvest. You should prune entire floricanes down to the base of the plant, making way for new growth. You should also cut down any suckers that pop out of the ground near the base of your blackberry plant.

When you prune your blackberry bushes, you don't want to go out there with just any old scissors. You'll need pruners for smaller, easy-to-clip canes and loppers for the thicker and bigger canes. If you notice diseased canes during any part of the year, cut them off as soon as possible and properly dispose of them. Avoid leaving the cut canes on the ground nearby as they could further spread the disease and infect other areas of the bush. Instead, burn or bury the diseased blackberry canes. Keeping your blackberry bushes pruned year-round will keep them healthy, tidy, and producing more delicious fruit for you to enjoy.