Bramble growth
Unless you planted ever-bearing raspberries, you'll spend your first year watching your berries grow and learning to prune them.  That gives you a chance to get a handle on the unique aspects of bramble biology so that you'll understand which canes to cut and which to leave in place.

The first factor to consider is how each type of bramble spreads vegetatively.  Blackberries and black raspberries grow long, arching canes that bend down and then root at the tip.  If you cut the tip loose and dig it up, you can transplant that youngster into a new part of the garden and expand your patch.  Red raspberries, on the other hand, send out horizontal roots just beneath the soil surface, then new plants pop up along those roots.  If you want to prevent your berry patch from turning into an impenetrable thicket, you'll need to understand which type of reproductive strategy your berries favor and prune accordingly.

The next thing you'll notice is that most blackberries and raspberries fruit only on second year wood.  The first shoots that come up are known as primocanes and will only be vegetative, making leaves but no blossoms.  Next year, those primocanes have matured into floricanes and will flower and make berries; at the same time, the canes are sending up new primocanes to prepare for the third year's berries.  After fruiting, floricanes die and must be removed if you don't want your berry patch to turn into a thicket.  But don't remove the primocanes or you won't get any fruits next year!


Bramble pruning
Now that you understand how brambles grow, pruning them should seem less complex. 

The three photos above show a black raspberry being tip pruned --- first the top is pinched off, then side shoots form, then the next year the bushy plant is loaded with

fruits.

The second type of pruning is winter pruning.  In early spring, go into your patch and cut out any dead canes --- you'll be able to tell which ones are dead because they'll be brown on the outside, often with peeling bark.  If in doubt, cut the top off the cane and take a peek inside.  Living canes will have a ring of green just under the bark.  They'll also tend to have plumper buds.

After taking out all of the dead canes, winter pruning is different for each type of bramble.  If you didn't summer prune carefully or often enough, blackberries and black raspberries will have reached out beyond the edges of the row.  Prune each plant until the side branches are one to two feet long.  While you're at it, use your twist ties to attach these new canes to the trellis wires.

You'll recall that red raspberries grow differently, sending up new shoots from their roots rather than making long, trailing canes.  As a result, you only need to prune them once a year, in the winter.  First, cut out any dead canes, then thin until canes are about six inches apart.

Ever-bearing raspberries are a bit different because they have two fruiting periods each year --- one in the spring and one in the fall.  If you only want a fall harvest, pruning is absurdly simple --- just mow down the whole row of raspberries in the winter.  However, if you want to enjoy raspberries both in the spring and in the fall, you'll need to follow the advice above for normal red raspberries and also cut the tops off the canes that fruited the previous summer.  Most people admonish you to remove the top third of these canes, but the truth is that you're cutting off the dead part.  After snipping off a few tops, you'll start getting an eye for the point at which the plump, live cane turns into the more shriveled, dead cane.


Annual care
Except for the complexities of pruning, your bramble patch will mostly take care of itself.  Each spring, you'll want to topdress your plants with compost then smother any potential weeds with mulch.  The brambles will flower and then fruit, generally bearing between late June and August.

Bramble fruits tend to be more resilient than strawberries, so you can probably get away with picking the berries only twice a week.  Red raspberries, though, have a tendency to mold in hot, humid climates, so harvest more often.

A well-tended patch of blackberries or raspberries can last a very long time.  Keep pruning and mulching and you'll be eating from your plants a decade or more after planting.  Now that's a good return on your investment!

This week's lunchtime series is exerpted from Weekend Homesteader: February, which is available for 99 cents from Amazon's kindle store.  The ebook also includes a primer on choosing and caring for a backyard flock of chickens, information on buying in bulk, and tips for creating your own apprenticeship.  If you enjoy the book, please consider leaving me a review.

This post is part of our Easy Berries lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Easy berries Choosing and planting strawberries Maintaining a strawberry bed Choosing, planting, and training brambles Pruning and maintaining brambles

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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