Fall garden cleanup/fruit pruning

Just pruned my strawberries yesterday and have yet to finish pruning my blackberries and red raspberries, so I hope it's not too late!

what kind of raspberries are you guys growing? some varieties grow on 2 year old wood, other on new wood. make sure you verify the proper pruning method for your variety before you hack your plants up lol. I have a heritage red ever bearing raspberry plant that technically is good for 2 crops but I cut mine back in the winter in order to get 1 bigger crop in August/Sept.

how do you prune strawberries? I'll have to google that now...i havent done anything to my strawberries for 2 years.

Our strawberries are in raised beds making mowing with a lawn mower not possible. I use hedge clippers and cut everything down to 2 to 3 inches in length, then rake out the beds, done. I did this last year and then after a couple of hard frosts covered the beds with a thick blanket of straw for the winter. We had a great crop this year, so hopefully the crop will do as well next year. After that, I'm not as certain as the plants will be going on their 4th season of production - I plan on re-planting the beds one at a time (there are thre 4'x8' beds) so that we have at least two in production at any given time.

For the red raspberries, I just cut out the woody canes that already produced. Black berries I'm at a loss - ours grew to enormous lengths this year and produced wonderful, full berries. The canes are obviously too long, but I cannot find consistent instructions on how to properly prune them. Any advice?

PS - the row you can see in the pic is what the black berries looked like mid summer - they are now even longer!

Black Raspberries (what some people mean by Blackberries) grow fruit on 2nd year canes. In the fall (now), prune any dead/old canes that bore fruit this year - they will not bear next year. Just leave the new canes that grew this year. They will produce abundantly next year. By trimming out the old canes, you'll save the water and nutrients for the canes that will produce fruit.

DBoon - we actually have Blackberries, not Black Raspberries. Any idea on those?

Why would you want to prune your blackberries?

I just cut out the dead second year canes, either in the fall after picking, to limit disease spread to the 1 year canes, or, in the spring, since the dead canes help hold snow and give wind support to the first year canes.
(I have read arguments for both timings, the relative advantages probably depend on the relative risks of disease and winter cold damage).

I have also heard that blackberries suffer when grown near raspberries, some sort of disease crossover. Not sure if it is true, but since my neighbour put in raspberries, my blackberry yield quality has gone down.

My canes get 2-3 m long, but they arch so the standing height is usually less than 2 m.

I'd like to keep the blackberries contained a bit - they're planted in a row, I have horizontal wire runnning the length of the row on t-posts to help trellis them, but the canes are growing like crazy to the extent that it makes it difficult to mow the grass on either side of the row and manage the general area. I suppose this is not a bad problem to have and I should not be complaining.

Hi timfromohio,

Blackberries bear fruit on second year canes as well. So after they bear, cut the bearing cane in the fall. Then, the new canes will be fruit bearing canes the following year.

Just curious - timfromohio - is that name a play on edfromohio (note my avatar)?

DBoon - no creativeness with my name. I'm Tim and live in NEOhio, hence "timfromohio"

I did clip out the canes that appeared dead and trimmed some others yesterday. Is it possible to take clippings and replant them to start a new row?

I've never tried rooting blackberry clippings. If you can get them to root in water, then it should work. Give it a try.

Never done a thing with strawberries, but I remove the woody canes of raspberries sometime in the early fall and trim the rest down to 3-4 feet tall in the late fall or winter, round the same time I prune the apple tree. No particular knowledge of horticulture. It's been working out so far. Blackberries are mostly a weed here, so I cut them back when they grow through the fence from the neighbors yard and they grow back in about 5 minutes.

With strawberries I generally try to thin the plants by removing some of the older plants in late summer after the berries are done. This allows younger, more vigorous plants to fill in. i usually have a ton of weeds, too, so between accidentally pulling plants while weeding and deliberately removing some plants, I take out at least half of the plants each summer. In commercial beds or large home patches some people till by rows, tilling the place where older plants grew and leaving strips where newer plants have spread. This means tilling rows about as wide as the rototiller, and leaving similar rows. I haven't tried this method.

I don't really prune my raspberries, I merely remove the canes after they are done fruiting. If I don't get around to it in summer, the canes I want to remove are dead by winter or early spring, so I remove them then. This seems to work fine for my Fallgold raspberries. I do the same for my Heritage raspberries, but they don't produce as well as Fallgold, never have. If you're picking a variety, I recommend the Fallgold. The berries are abundant and very tasty, but small and soft.