How to Prune Your Summer-Fruiting Raspberries

Summer-bearing raspberry crowns mature and begin bearing fruit in a single large crop in the early to mid-summer in their second year of growth. Like all raspberries, the roots and crown of the plants are perennial and the canes are biennial. Pruning stimulates and makes physical room for new fruit producing canes to grow, making annual pruning a must or your fruit production will drop off precipitously. Pruning of summer-bearing canes should be done faithfully, twice each year.

Secateurs
Loppers

Instructions

- 1
  Cut away all dead, damaged, diseased, broken or weak canes down to the crown of the plant at the soil line in the early spring. Snip off the tips of any one-year-old canes that are living but have tips that were killed by winter damage. Pull all of the cut canes carefully from the plant and discard them.
- 2
  Prune out all of the living but second-year canes, leaving only those that measure 1/4-inch in diameter at a length of 30 inches from the crown. You want evenly thinned crowns with canes that have roughly 6 inches of space around them. This makes the physical room needed for new growth, allows sunlight penetration and air flow and cuts down on disease.
- 3
  Trim the canes back again after the fruit harvest has finished for the year. Cut back the oldest canes that did not bear any fruit or produced very little fruit down to the crown at the soil line. Collect and discard these cuttings as well and do not leave any decaying plant material on the soil surface as this can invite disease.

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