How to get the Most Fruit Production from your Black Raspberries Video

Felix from Gurney's shows off a black raspberry plant and shares tips on maximizing your plants' fruit output. Learn where the fruit originates from, how to identify and manage the first fruiting canes, and more.

Hi everyone Felix here with Gurney's and today I want to talk to you a little bit about where your fruit comes from with black raspberries. You've seen in our earlier video, we showed you during the dormant season how to prune back your late season growth and I'm standing by that black raspberry plant right now and it's fruit ripening season and there's some points I can show... one of them is where your fruiting shoot initiated. If you look here through the foliage, here's a good example, you can see our cane from last year which is a nice dark purple, that bud send out a shoot and there's a cluster of fruit at the end of it, and that's happening all along these canes. That we trained last year and we pruned this spring. The other thing, the question I get all the time is: how do you tell your flora canes from your primer cane and we have a good example. I just showed you the purple, flora cane color cane. That's this year, it looks like that, purple and it of course, has two fruit shoots. It's pretty easy to distinguish. We also have next year skins coming up, which are your prima canes, and you can see this really nice fuzz that's on there. It's kind of a sheen that looks very bluish in color, very easy to distinguish these once you know what they look like, and so that's our prima cane that's growing, and it will be next year's fruiting production and this leaf at the base, you can see our bud, our fruit bud is just now developing at the base of that petiole, this stem on the leaf. So it's developing right there. Further point is that we have pruned this back at about waist-high. It had a growth tip on it and we've pruned it back, and you can see that pruning, which was done about a week two weeks ago, is forcing those buds to break so they're going to continue to grow up, just like this one along during the summer and what that's doing for us is it's increasing our fruit production. Instead of just having a bud here, going all the way up the cane and then stopping it like we did, this way we're going to have lots of canes shooting off and lateral canes will also have buds on them that will bear fruit next year. So by tipping this, we've forced about three buds to break your lure and then we'll have one of them continue to grow on up and it'll have a vegetative tip and it will reach the top here and we'll top that in the February of next year. So there's some points in getting maximum food production, and also so you can understand where your fruit comes from on those second year canes, what they look like and how to figure out what your first two canes look like, and how to manage those. Thanks for joining us and look for some other videos on how to grow brambles and have success and have a massive fruit load. I absolutely love black raspberries, these things are excellent, they're coming on here right now in mid-June, I love them. Lots of fruit, hope you have success. Good luck!