Zack Snipes
11.01.2024 - 13:48 / theenglishgarden.co.uk / Clare Foggett
Many gardeners dread fruit pruning for fear it is complicated but there are a couple of simple rules that make things easier. Arm yourself with sharp bypass secateurs, and some sturdy gloves if you’re pruning gooseberries, to protect your hands from their spines.
The best fruit is produced on branches that are 2-3 years old, so the first step is always to take out any wood that’s older than this. If you do this every year, in theory your gooseberry or red or white currant should never have any wood that’s more than four years old. Blackcurrants are pruned in a similar way, but they fruit on wood that’s 1-2 years old, so any branches that are older than this can be removed.
White and red currants fruit on 2-3 year old wood. Photo: Shutterstock
If you follow this regime, you should be removing about one third of the total number of the bush’s branches each year. Always cut them right down to the base, which will encourage the bush to produce strong new fruiting stems from the bottom of the plant.
The second rule is to cut out any dead, diseased, damaged or dying wood – usually easy to spot even though there are no leaves by the bark’s colour – and the third rule is to take out any stems that are growing inwards, towards the bush’s centre. The idea is to create a goblet-shaped bush with a fairly open centre. If you want, you can then shorten the branches you’ve left behind and their side shoots by a couple of buds, which will encourage the bush to produce better quality, larger fruit in slightly smaller quantities.
This gooseberry bush needs to be thinned: its oldest branches taken out at the base and inward growing shoots cut out, with the aim of leaving an open-centred, goblet-shaped bush. Photo: Shutterstock
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Zack Snipes
AS SHE OFTEN DOES, naturalist and nature writer Nancy Lawson—perhaps known better to some of you as the Humane Gardener after the title of her first book—caught my attention the other day.
Pruning can be intimidating. Many of us fear making a mistake our plants won’t recover from. Overall, trees are resilient; with a little practice and know-how, any gardener should be able to tackle this task. Here are some things to keep in mind before grabbing the saw.
Winter is, broadly speaking, the ideal time to prune most trees and shrubs.
This year, when gardeners look at plant and seed catalogs, I think they will be inclined to go for the safe and familiar. After all, even optimists need a sense of security. It will probably be a banner year for roses of all kinds, with reds selling well. The ongoing vogue for cottage flowers will probably continue to be strong. In fact, the wildest thing many people will invest in come spring will be a few of the more bizarre coleus cultivars.
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(Aza’lea). Botanists now classify all plants they once called Azaleas as Rhododendrons. Garden lovers still use Azalea for deciduous or leaf-losing kinds and for a few that are not, and the name Rhododendron for evergreen kinds which have large, leathery leaves. In the treatment that follows, Azalea is used as a common name and Rhododendron as the scientific name, thus, when a species is named it is written, for example, R. calendulaceum instead of A. calendulacea.
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Lottie and Dottie have been very clever and set up their own Etsy page. They had to ask for a little bit of help with all the technical stuff from a lovely young lady called Emski. She was very patient and kind as she knew all about that sort of stuff.
Courtesy of White Flower Farm