How do I prune my gooseberry bushes?
When pruning gooseberries, you need to understand their fruiting patterns before you make any cuts.
Gooseberries develop their fruit on one-, two-, and three-year-old branches. Once a branch hits four years – or older – it no longer bears fruit and should be removed. You’re also going to remove any broken, diseased, damaged or weak branches before going any further. They will only cause you problems in the long run.
Once you’ve accomplished this, you need to take a step back and look at what you have left. Ideally you’re going to want to end up with about nine strong branches - three each of first, second, and third year growth. First year branches are easy to distinguish because they bear fruit directly on the stem. Second and third year branches bear their fruit on spurs.
Remember that whenever you prune a plant, you never want to remove more than one third of the plants overall bulk in any given year. This is especially true of fruiting plants since heavy pruning will cut down on the amount of fruit a plant produces while its concentrating on putting on growth to replace what it’s lost.
So once you’ve removed the older, non-fruiting branches and any that are broken, diseased, damaged, or weak, you need to ask yourself how much of the plant’s total volume you’ve removed. If you feel that you are approaching one third, then stop and leave the rest of the pruning until next year.
Severely overgrown bushes may take a few years of pruning to get them into optimal shape.
As long as you continue to give your gooseberries an annual pruning each spring, they will continue to reward you with substantial crops for years to come.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at vanessa@gardenmuse.ca.
Posted: April 1, 2011
