How to Prune Raspberries in 7 Steps

Sweet, juicy, plump raspberries can grow just outside your door. These delicious fruits are easy to tend in the home garden and can provide consistent harvests alongside beautiful foliage. But unpruned raspberry plants can quickly turn from a dream to a nightmare if they get out of hand. Pruning ensures that your raspberries remain manageable, attractive, disease-free, and high-yielding for seasons to come.

If you’re intimidated by cutting your plants, this article should alleviate your woes. Raspberries are very forgiving and surprisingly easy to prune once you understand their growth habits! Let’s dig into the 7 simple steps to giving your berries a haircut.  

How Do You Prune Raspberries?

Raspberries are best pruned in the late winter or early spring when they are dormant and leafless. Use sharp, sanitized loppers and hand pruners to remove last year’s canes. Cut the woody second-year growth (called floricanes) back to the ground. This makes way for new growth (primocanes) that produce fruit.

Next, remove any canes growing out of the row or bed, and thin the plants to three to five canes per foot. Lastly, train your canes to stay on the trellis using twine or ties that keep the vines upright.

7 Steps to Prune Raspberries for Higher Yields

Raspberries can grow without pruning, but they won’t be nearly as abundant. Proper pruning ensures high yields, quality fruit, and less risk of disease. It increases the airflow into the crowns and prevents the plants from becoming overcrowded like brambles. It also ensures that your raspberries produce for years to come. 

If left unpruned, these vigorous plants can actually become their own worst enemy, causing over competition for sunlight that can kill off the lower parts of the plants and reduce your harvests. Keep your patch tidy and healthy with these quick steps. But before you begin, be sure that your tools are sharp and sanitized.

Prune at the Right Time

Like many perennial plants, raspberries are best pruned while dormant. It is much easier to see the branches (canes) when they are leafless. Moreover, pruning during the dormant months of late winter or early spring ensures that the plants have plenty of time to heal their wounds as they enter a new growth cycle.

Avoid pruning your raspberries in the fall. The floricanes will wither after they finish fruiting, but you must resist the urge to cut them back. Cornell University research shows that leaving these canes is crucial for helping the plant survive the winter. The roots and crowns continue pulling energy from the dying canes throughout fall and early winter. Wait until late winter or early spring (December through February in most temperate regions) to start pruning.

If you forget to prune in early spring, you can still tend to the patch during the growing season, but it may be more difficult to access the canes and sort through the overgrowth. Still, pruning at any time is better than no pruning at all. Be sure to remove diseased, damaged, or dead branches any time you spot them.

Know Your Canes

Raspberry canes cause a lot of confusion amongst gardeners, but this simple explanation will sort it out! These perennial plants technically have a biennial (two-year) growth habit. The branches or vines are technically called canes. 

There are two main types of canes:

So primocanes and floricanes are really just fancy words for first-year and second-year wood. But to fully grasp this concept, you must know what type of raspberry you’re dealing with.

In other words, summer-bearing raspberries produce fruit on the woody canes that grew last summer. This fruit also comes in one big flush in the summer. In contrast, everbearing types like ‘Heritage’ raspberries produce fruit on this year’s primocanes. If you are familiar with June-bearing vs. everbearing strawberries, this duality will sound familiar.

Before you start pruning, check your variety. This will guide you on the next steps.

Prune Old Floricanes to Ground Level

When late winter pruning time arrives, last year’s canes are typically spent and dead. These branches expelled all their energy on fruit production and they are no longer needed by the plant.

It’s important to remove all visibly dead canes. Perform this pruning on both summer-bearing and everbearing plants. This will prevent disease from developing or spreading around the decaying branches.

To the untrained eye, all of the branches on a dormant raspberry plant may look dead. If you’re unsure how to decipher between dead canes and living ones, don’t worry!

All of these dead canes can be pruned back to the soil level. Use sanitized, sharp pruners and avoid whipping around the branches in case they have disease spores that could spread around. Rake or gather any debris and remove it from the garden.

Remove Diseased, Damaged, or Out-of-Row Canes

When removing last year’s canes, also take note of any diseased or damaged branches. These should be cut out as low to the ground as possible. Raspberry blights and anthracnose thrive in wet weather and spread predominantly in late summer and fall. If you didn’t catch these infected canes last season, they typically appear dead or infected in late winter. Any remaining debris should be cleared. Loppers can be useful for larger branches.

Raspberries also have a tendency to ramble, so don’t forget to prune any canes that have grown outside of the row or bed. Even if the canes look nice, it’s important to remove them because they can cause overcrowding and weedy growth. Narrow rows are ideal for raspberry production because they prevent disease and make it easier to harvest.

Cut Back or Thin Primocanes to 4-6 Inches

For everbearing types, you have the option to cut back all remaining canes to the ground in late winter. This will encourage completely new growth and offer one big late-summer crop. However, you can also leave some primocanes to harvest two smaller crops of plants.

For summer-bearing types, the final winter pruning step is thinning. It may seem strange to remove canes that will provide fruit, but fewer canes can actually yield more berries because they have more resources and light. Raspberries can easily become a tangled mess, and just like other garden plants, they struggle to compete with each other when they become overcrowded.

You want to cut away any short, weak, or spindly canes that remain. Thinning will prevent overcrowding and crisscrossed branches. Moreover, this helps you select the most vigorous canes so the crown will channel its energy toward maximum growth. The best canes are usually at least ¼ inch in diameter, strong, sturdy, and taller than the others.

The goal is to have three to five primocanes per foot, with approximately three to six inches between each cane. If this looks shockingly thin to you, don’t worry! The plants will grow all their foliage and fill out the bed in no time.

Pinch Black Raspberry Tips in Summer

If you’re growing red raspberries, you can skip this step. Black raspberry varieties benefit the most from tipping. When summer comes around, the canes should be very tall and lush. “Tipping” or “topping” is a common practice for encouraging more fruit buds and reducing overall height.

Once the canes reach over 30 inches tall, you can cut the upper two to three inches off of the stems. This signals the plant to stop focusing on vegetative growth and turn its attention to producing floral buds and fruit. Tipping also encourages lateral branches, which promotes bushier growth, higher yields, and easier harvest.

Export Clippings Out of the Garden

When all your pruning is done, it’s very important to remove all debris from the garden. This rule applies to vegetable and fruit plants because leftover debris can harbor disease. If the clippings are not infected with fungi or other pathogens, it’s safe to use them in your compost as “browns.” But if there are any signs of disease, be sure to burn them or throw them in the trash. 

Mulching is very beneficial for raspberries, but you don’t want to mulch with the clippings from the plants. Instead, use dry deciduous leaves or straw to help retain soil moisture and reduce weed pressure. 

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