This topic contains 11 replies, has 8 voices, and was last updated by zuf 10 years ago.
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I have not tried this but it makes sense to prune as you describe, funnily enough I am about to prune my soft fruit today. Gooseberries especially need good pruning so you can pick the fruit without being pricked too much.
my gooseberry bushes have also ended up that kind of shape. i have been cutting out the middle to leave the ‘wineglass’ shape, which seems to work despite there being no leg.
i’d be a bit worried that cutting the whole bush back to just one stick in one go would be too much of a shock for the bush? the pruning that you’ve already done should have rejuvenated it quite well.
if you do cut it right back to create the leg it might be an idea to plant the stems that you remove, as cuttings, which you can train from the get-go into the traditional shape. plus then you also have some insurance as at least some of them will live!
I took cuttings of all my soft fruit in late January and I am surprised to find that with little more care than digging a slit and inserting a cutting, they are all showing signs of leaves already
Each year I cut out a few old branches to then pick the fruit from them. I stick them in a vase of water. After a few months they have rooted ready to plant out nice and deep. I discovered this by accident.
Just as a matter of interest. You will notice that the thorns on gooseberries stick out at about 45deg towards you from the stems/branches. If you wear a typical rubber palmed gardening glove, not leather. I say this because the synthetic close fitting gardening gloves give more sensitivity. If you then take a light grip at the base of each fruit laden stem, then pull your hand forward towards the end of each stem, where your other hand will be holding a suitable container for catching the fruit in. You will find that the thorns will not prick you at all and will simply spring back into place again leaving you with a nice, painlessly acquired harvest of gooseberries.
I harvested seven medium sized bushes this way last year for the first time without a single drop of blood being spilled. Painlessly !
Rooting them now in spring works really well. I take 20cm of new green spring growth, remove all the leaves except two or three at the top. Then i stick them in soil somwhere in shady position and a motnhs time they start to grow and are ready for tranplanting on final position. If you are able to bend branches down to the soil and burry them so the first part of branch is still conected to mother plant, middle part is in the soil with rock sitting on top for moisture and markation, top part is above ground so it can grow bigger. With this method you are one step closer, plant providing energy from a mother plant and making new root on branches that you can cut and transplant in fall.
If you propagate gooseberry by layering how do they take before the layered branch grows roots? How then do you move your new plant to its own growing space?
If you layer it now, you can tranplant in end of summer/fall. You just cut the layered branch at the base of mother plant and carefully dig out rooted branch.
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