Spring Gardening: Pruning Gold Raspberries

Now let's talk about raspberries. Pruning raspberries involves a certain amount of brutality and in fact we're going to have to kill a lot of these canes. If you have neighbors that are looking for canes you can rip them up and spring transplant them. You don't even need a lot of ceremony; you can just rip them up and replant them. These are very special, they're not red, they're not purple, they're golden. We find them especially pest free and easy to produce. Now the goal in pruning this patch is to leave a small percentage, maybe 30 or 20% of these canes intact which means that I have hundreds of canes that need cutting. So what I'm going to do is in my mind I'm going to choose some of these mature beautiful canes that have growth ready for they're second year in fruiting and everything else, anything that doesn't meet the grade in the path, in the way, not big enough, old and dead. You see I'm finding excuses to cut everything but the champs, this being a champ here. This ones broken and crossing, out it comes. This ones old and dead, out it comes. This ones in the path, out it comes. When I finish I'll be left with a stand of beautiful mature canes and then this will fruit this year, and die off and then this years growth will become next years fruiting canes. And that's a little primer on pruning your golden raspberries.