When pruning raspberries, it is important to know whether the shrubs will produce fruit in summer or fall. You should keep this in mind when cutting back.

Cutting raspberries properly doesn’t require a lot of skill or effort. It is only important that you follow the tips for summer-bearing and autumn-bearing berry bushes. If you mix the two plants in the garden and keep the harvested dates, you can harvest from early summer to late autumn.

Tips for Summer Bearing Berry Bushes

Summer raspberries such as “Schönemann”, “Meeker” and “Rubaka” varieties have two significant advantages: on the one hand, their fruit quality is slightly higher than that of autumn raspberries. On the other hand, they are berry bushes particularly tolerant.

cut summer-bearing raspberries

bite raspberry From about July after you harvest the last fruits. You should cut these fruit sticks close to the ground and carefully remove them from the net. At this time it is easy to distinguish the dark, old from the green young shoots.

Tip: Leave at least five important young rods from the existing stock, shorten them by two meters if necessary and fix them properly on the scaffold.

Bavarian State Institute for Viticulture and gardening Recommends leaving eight to twelve young shoots per meter – if there are more, this may be easier pilzerkrankengen Spread.

Sort Summer Raspberries in March

It may be advisable to cut the raspberries again the following March if the stubbles of the small sticks are still sticking out of the ground.

Tip: Also remove weak and diseased young shoots from berry bushes in early spring. So the main shoot has more power and can move faster.

Correctly cut autumn raspberries

Autumn raspberries are easy to care for Shrubs for garden And a little more susceptible to maggots or raspberry beetles. Typical autumn varieties are “Autumn Bliss”, “Himbo-Top” and “Polka”. After harvesting the fruit, you can harvest the raspberries in November or late winter — at ground level.

Cut “Twotimer” Raspberries Right

The “twotimer” raspberry is a cross between autumn and summer fruits and has both annual and biennial shoots. This has the advantage that “twotimer” varieties such as “Sugana” wear out twice a year. This means that raspberries can be harvested in early summer (early June) and late autumn (end of October).

“Twotimer” raspberry: The ‘Sugana’ variety produces twice a year. (Source: McPhotos / Imago Images)

to risk: Two year old shoots should always be cut near the ground. These are the fruits that produced fruit in the previous summer and are therefore distinctly different from the smaller rods.

just fight the pests

According to the experts in “My Beautiful Garden” magazine, you should leave two of the cut sticks in the bed for each walking meter to keep predatory mites and other useful insects You can build a nest on it. As new shoots regrow in the spring, the animal helpers move on and stop insect like a spider mite plants fern

Pruning measures for a good harvest

If you want to harvest autumn varieties twice a year, you should harvest raspberries immediately after the early summer harvest. However, it generally makes more sense to grow both autumn and summer raspberries, as double cropping greatly weakens individual berry bushes – this can reduce crop yield in a worst case scenario.

Raspberry Cutting: Bypass or Anvil Scissors?

A basic distinction is made between anvil and bypass shears.

Anvil models are suitable for rough cutting measures such as thick twigs, dead branches or hardwoods. These shears have better power transmission and do not bend so easily while cutting. However, anvil shears are less suitable for sensitive plant stems. When you bite you will be squeezed very hard.

Bypass shears: They work with two sharp blades and are suitable for shrubs with thin branches. (Source: Klaus W. Schmidt / Imago Images)

Bypass shears have double-edged blades that allow you to cut thin twigs and plant stems with greater precision. This type of shears is especially ideal for pruning ornamental shrubs such as roses, but also berry bushes.

our tip
When pruning your raspberry bush, it’s best to wear gardening gloves or rose gloves. They protect it from the fine thorns on its rods.

Root barrier against overgrown raspberry bushes

The shallow roots of the raspberry bush spread to a radius of two meters in the ground. Runners also displace other plants in the garden. You can prevent a strong increase in width with a root barrier or rhizome barrier.

Barriers, which are commercially available as roll goods, are made of a particularly strong polyethylene film: it is about two millimeters thick. Before planting a raspberry bush, dig a barrier about 40 centimeters into the ground and allow the edges of the foil to protrude about five centimeters from the ground. That’s why root runners can’t climb it.

our tip
Subsequent root barriers are also worthwhile if raspberry plants are already spreading in the garden. However, make sure you regularly remove any roots outside the obstruction. This is the only way to keep the bushes under control.

Instructions for training on wire trellis

next speleirobst It is also advisable to tie berry bushes such as raspberries to a scaffold and “educate” them. This is especially true for summer-bearing raspberries. follow these steps:

Drive several wooden poles about two meters long at a distance of 1.50 meters into the ground and spread the wires horizontally at heights of 40, 80 and 160 cm. Place young raspberry plants about 50 cm apart directly on a wooden mesh and shorten young plants to 30 cm high.

When new shoots emerge about 30 cm from the earth in late May, twelve to 15 healthy, well-spaced sticks are attached to the trellis wires and “trained” during the summer. The remaining rods will be shortened to ground level by the end of May. Cut them off when fruit canes stick to the top wire in late autumn.