Hi everyone! I’m pruning paralyzed; I’m worried I’ll cut off something important. I also may have waited too long since leaves are budding.
What, if anything, should I remove from my two blueberry bushes (Elliott and Bluecrop) and my Mars grape?
I don’t know anything about blueberries, but it’s not too late to prune your grape. It looks like your grape has two trunks. Unless you want two for insurance in case of cold damage, it would be better to pick one and prune off the other. Mars should be fully hardy in your zone though, so I don’t think you need two. Then cut the top of your remaining cane to 3-4 inches below your fruiting wire. Once the shoots are a few inches long, pull off all but 4 or so vigorous, well-spaced and positioned shoots at the top. Those shoots may have a few clusters. If you really want some fruit this year, you can leave one or two. You will need a stronger stake soon. Even without fruit, the weight of the leaves and shoots will be too much for that bamboo stake.
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Maybe this from University of Maine will help for blueberry plants:
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Pruning paralysis is real. Blueberries are really forgiving though, you’d have to try hard to kill one with bad pruning. Just take out the oldest thickest canes at the base and anything dead or crossing. The grape you can cut back harder than you think, they bounce back from almost anything.
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Thanks guys! Trimmed the blueberries, and now just have to decide which internal shoots need to go. I think I accidentally trained them both tighter than they should be due to the bird netting, should I pin them more openly to try to train them wider?
@GrapeNut thank you! I hemmed and hawed last year on which trunk to trim and kept both, so I guess I should just bite the bullet. The one comes up to the middle wire and splits into the two mid level horizontal canes; the second is just tall and basically tipped over to be horizontal at the top wire. I imagine I should trim the mid level trunk and leave the tall one?
I’m hardly an expert, but in the four years I’ve had my pair of southern highbush (jewel & emerald, plus a third last fall), I’ve had something go wrong every year, including missed and sub-par prunings & months without irrigation due to a broken system and I’ve gotten a crop all four years. I’m not super optimizing, but I say don’t sweat it too much, do what makes sense to you, and honestly evaluate the results
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Yeah, I would keep the tall one. You mentioned two wires. How are you planning on training the vine?
I forget all the styles I learned about last spring…I know I posted more about it here. I know Mars droops so I was planning on whatever method allows for that, but also if possible train out two horizontal canes (one mid one high) to maximize how many fruits I can get. I have no idea what I’m really doing though, I appreciate any insight!
In my experience, a vertically divided (one higher, one lower) canopy is really hard to manage. The higher part will grow much more vigorously than the lower. I would go with a single wire. If you want higher production, a horizontally divided canopy (two wires side-by-side about a foot or two apart) is the way to go but more difficult to build a trellis for.
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Well, I did it - I cut off the second trunk and pruned the extra and dead bits, now I just wait for the rest of the canes to fill out. Then I prune any that vines off the trunk where they shouldn’t be, right?
Also, is it worth trying to propagate from the cuttings? Almost all of them have a decent amount of leaves already…
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You can pull them off as they sprout. The resulting wounds heal over faster than if you prune them later, and this way they don’t compete with the shoots you do want to keep. If there are any double shoots on the nodes you are keeping, keep only one.
Most grapes are easiest to root from fully dormant cuttings. It’s hard to keep those new shoots from wilting.