Guide to Properly Trimming Blueberry Bushes

Fresh, homegrown blueberries, right in your back yard! Blueberry bushes are amazing, but caring for them can be daunting. For one thing, trimming blueberry bushes is a chore that must be done every year. And just like pruning any flowering and fruiting bush, the process is a bit complex. However, follow these easy step-by-step instructions for when to trim blueberry bushes, and you'll be trimming yours like a pro.

Blueberries must be pruned to remove old, dead, and damaged canes. At the same time, pruning the bushes trains them to have a compact base opening up into an airy center trimmed to allow sun and air movement through the bush. A blueberry bush that is overgrown will produce less than a properly trimmed bush.

Trimming blueberry bushes best occurs when they're dormant - in winter or very early spring before buds or any other activity appear. However besides knowing when to trim blueberry bushes, it is important to understand how.

The first step in caring for a blueberry bush is to look at it, and visualize how you'd like it to look when you're finished. This is actually an important step! Visualizing the bush's final state helps you to make the cuts you need to make.

Once you've got a picture in your head of how your blueberry bush will look post-trim, get to work. Remove dead and broken canes, and consider removing canes older than seven years. In a regularly maintained blueberry bush, there will probably be no more than two or three of these older canes.

Next, remove branches that touch other branches, dead twigs, and crossing branches. The goal is to open up the center of the bush to light and air, while at the same time maintaining two to three older canes to support fruit production.

When you're done, the blueberry bush should be fairly narrow and compact at the bottom, widening upward into airy, open foliage.

If your blueberry bush or bushes are overgrown, don't fear. Follow the steps above, but consider taking a few years to get the bush completely back into line. For instance, an overgrown bush is likely to be all older canes either in the late stages of production or not producing any longer, plus some very weak new cane growth that doesn't go anywhere because the older canes take up all the room.

In this situation, you may want to retain two or three of these old canes even though technically they "should" be removed, and open up the bush to allow some of the new canes to thrive and take over in the coming years.