How to Prune Boysenberries
This summer at Boysen Berry Farm we’re making next year’s harvest top priority. If you grow our Rudy’s Original Heritage Boysenberries or plan to grow them, they will require special attention soon after harvest. Because we have forty rows and a total of 2,400 vines, we’ll tackle pruning in two phases.
Right now we need to lift the sprawling, new vines so we can weed and mow the field. We’re also clearing clogged emitters to maximize watering and keep the roots moist during the searing hot summer days. In a few months we’ll put in 1,000 new tip-starts and finish pruning out the old vines. But for your backyard vines, you can trim out the old ones as soon as the boysenberry season is over.
While your juicy backyard boysenberries are still fresh in your memory and in your freezer, it’s time to do some post-harvest pruning and trellising!
To Get Started You’ll Need…
- Sharp pruning shears to cut out the old canes.
- Full leather gauntlet gloves to wrangle the vigorously growing, thorny vines up onto the trellis wires.
- knee-pads (optional)
These will make it possible for you to enjoy caring for your backyard boysenberries pain-free.
Out with the old, up with the new!
We manage our vines on a simple trellis system. Our trellis uses posts 5’ to 6’ tall and 18 feet apart, with three wires stretched at equal distances between them to support the vines.
The trellis wires need to be strong enough to support the vines which will grow as long as twenty feet.
Planted six feet apart, we weave them up into the wires and wind them in a spiral pattern.
Pain-Free Pick-up: Lift with your palms, not your fingers!
Speaking from experience, thorns can puncture right through leather fingertips, especially the thorns lower down. Here’s a useful tip: I use my gloved palm to scoop up the vines from underneath and that helps cut down on the thorny finger pokes.
At our farm, our hired hands lift thousands of vines onto the trellis wires. They wrap gorilla tape around their gloved fingers and palms too! After just two days of lifting vines, the gloves already need a rewrap. Those vines shred gloves when you’ve got as many as we do!
Which Vines Go, Which Ones Stay?
After the harvest, your two types of vines will be easy to tell apart. We wait at least a month after we’ve picked the last boysenberry so that the new primocane vines have had time to grow long enough to lift and weave onto the trellis. The old floricanes that just gave you boysenberries will have withering leaves and dried berry stems. They need to be cut back to the ground and thrown out or burned. See below, note the old floricanes grow in leaflets of three, with berry stems.
Two Different Types of Leaves
Another way to tell the difference is that the primocanes produce lush, green, serrated compound leaves of five to seven leaflets per stem. See below.
Prune these out. The fading leaves of the spent floricanes are typically in groups of three.
Lift these onto trellis. New, lush primocanes typically grow in leaflets of five to seven per stem.
After the primocanes go dormant in the fall and drop their leaves through the winter, the primocanes will generate new floricane leaf buds in late winter to early spring. That’s when their name changes from primocane to floricane.
Choose The Thickest Canes
We cut the old floricanes off at the base, then at the top trellis line, and finally at the midline. Pull gently to untangle the old floricanes from the new fast growing primocanes.
Choose five or six of the thickest, healthiest looking red primocanes. Prune out any thin or scraggly primocanes so that roots can fully nourish the remaining ones, to promote the largest boysenberries possible.
More. Want to read more about how to grow spectacular boysenberries? I’ve posted several other related articles. You can find links to these other articles on our Blog page.
Questions: Do you have questions about how to grow spectacular boysenberries? I’d love to hear from you! Please share your questions below and I’ll respond. Thank you!
