The best way to Prune Thimbleberries

Fairytale title apart, the thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) is a rugged California native that grows across all Sun Set Environment Zones. The thicket-forming bramble creates berries that are pink to consume but desirable crinkly foliage and flowers that are white to grace your backyard. The nectar of the flowers that are huge provides hummingbirds to your own yard at the same time. Thimbleberry reaches up to 10-feet tall and should be trellised and pruned frequently.

Put on gloves before pruning recently planted thimbleberries, if preferred. Unlike other brambles, the crops are thorn-free, which means you don’t have to to worry about scratches keeping your fingers clean.

Pinch flowers in the first year of development off. It encourages a robust root system while this stops any fresh fruit improvement. Fruiting that is best doesn’t happen on canes that are new, in just about any event, but on the shoots of year old canes.

With rubbing alcohol, clean the blades of your pruning device. Use long handled by-pass pruners or loppers, with respect to the dimensions of your crops. One thimbleberry bush will spread to be very extensive and puts up several sprouts each spring.

Cut down all of the canes 6″ of the prior year in the bottom of the plant along with pruners or your loppers following your harvest in July of the second-year. These can be the canes that made your harvest of raspberry-like fruit. Repeat each year.

Prune current-year canes which are weak or spindly in the foot of the stem off.

After leaves fall for wasp galls examine the plant, lumps that form on the stem of the thimbleberry. Thimbleberries are vulnerable to host the eggs of the parasitic wasp Diastrophus kincaidii, so much so the egg-stuffed galls of the wasps are called galls that are thimbleberry. The galls are a problem than something that harms the plant, although the stem can be weakened by them. To decrease incidence of potential galls, prune off stems with galls remaining below the gall on the plant after yearly pruning and above a bud. Dispose of the galls in the compost, maybe not in the trash pile.

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