How To Prune Blueberry Bushes

[Music Playing] I am David Epstein. On this edition of Growing Wisdom, I want to talk to you about how to prune blueberries and blueberries are great thing to prune early in spring. So, we are talking the mid-March time frame. It will depend on exactly where you are. Of course, some of you may have a lot of snow in the ground in the middle of March but you can still track out and prune your blueberries. So, I am standing in front of a couple of blueberry bushes which are fairly old. These are over a decade old and blueberries after about the third year need to be pruned. You do not want the branches crisscrossing each other. That is bad. it does not promote good air circulation. The other thing is that you want to prune off some of the flower buds. Too many flower buds actually are not great because your blueberry will be really tiny and we want big plump blueberries. Let us show you how to do this. Alright, so this particular branch here, I am actually going to remove. Now, one of the reasons I am going to remove this is because it is dead and how do I know it is dead. Well, it got this very grey color to it. It is not nice and red. There are really no buds on the end of this here and if I snipped this, I can see that the interior portion of that has no green color at all. So, we are going to cut this right where it meets the main branch here. This particular branch, it comes off of this main branch and then it goes out. It rubs against this guy here as you can see and it is crisscrossing right here. I want to remove that. That is going to promote beautiful air flow in here throughout these combs. Perhaps the branches damaged or diseased and you want to get that removed right to the base, use a pruning saw just take that out and this will hopefully promote a new branch from coming up in that same area, a nice new healthy, brand new, strong branch which in three years will have so nice blueberries on it. You are not going to really harm the bush. You could over prune it and ended up not getting as many blueberries as you would like but in general you really are not going to be able to kill this. They love to have an area with acidic soil. So, might as well right here the wet lands this is very acidic soil and the blueberries are very happy here. They also like a lot of water, one to two inches a week during the summer. I also like to put a little bit of straw around the base of my plants early in the spring that helps to conserve moisture. It also will help to keep the weeds down. So we hope this edition of Growing Wisdom helped you with pruning your blueberries. We want you to come back every week for all of our tips here at growingwisdom.com. [Music Playing]