Growing Fruits In Your Backyard – Cultivating Fruit
Growing bush fruits in your backyard brings a double pleasure. When you pick them fresh from the garden in early morning and serve them for breakfast covered with sugar and cream, and taste the raspberry jam, gooseberry tarts, currant jelly or blueberry muffins, you not only have the well being that comes with eating good food but also the gladness that comes from having, assisted in making it.
To do the job well and produce fruit of fine appearance and flavor means cultivating, fertilizing, spraying and pruning. Pruning is not the least important, by any means. Properly done, it helps keep the plant in a healthy condition by removing dead, weak and diseased parts. It also directs growth into the stronger parts of the plant and, therefore, helps to maintain its vigor. And, by removing excess fruit buds, overbearing with its consequent loss of fruit size and flavor is prevented.
First, one must have proper tools, sharp and in good working condition. The three tools necessary in pruning bush fruits are a long-handled lopping shear, a bramble hook and a pruning shear. Lopping shears are used to cut off raspberry and blackberry canes at the base of the plant and remove any large branches, too big to be cut with shears, of currants, gooseberries or blueberries. The bramble hook is used to cut off canes of raspberries and blackberries at the base. It must be very sharp and free from rust or the plants may be pulled up by the roots. Pruning shears are needed for lighter work : heading back red raspberries, shortening laterals of purple and black raspberries as well as blackberries and thinning out currants, gooseberries. and blueberries.
Tops of brambles are biennial in nature. Canes grow and form fruit buds one year, fruit and die the next. To help control insects and diseases, it is best to remove and burn these old canes as soon as they have finished fruiting in summer. If this is not done then, it may be done in spring with the regular pruning. Since many varieties of brambles are subject to winter injury, it is well to delay pruning until buds start. At that time, injured parts can be recognized more easily and cut off.
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