Winter is a good time to prune currants while they are dormant. As a bonus, you can also take cuttings at the same time to make new plants. They make great gifts for friends or neighbours or offer them to your local community garden or allotment.
Alternatively, you can prune currants in the summer at harvest time. This makes it easy to see which are the older branches – they will have the most fruit and should be removed from the base. I have childhood memories of sitting on the grass picking the ripe fruits off whole branches my Dad had just removed. I got very blackcurranty fingers! I still love the smell of blackcurrant leaves.
As currants produce the most fruit on two or three year old wood, you don’t usually need to prune new bushes for the first couple of years. For older plants, the aim of pruning is to keep the bush healthy and maximise fruit production. A mature plant can produce around 5 kg of fruit – that’s a lot of jam or jelly! The goal is to create an open goblet shape. This allows airflow, which keeps the plant healthy, and lets sunlight into the centre to ripen the fruits.
General steps
- Remove the three D’s – dead, diseased or damaged stems
- Remove any crossing or rubbing branches
- Remove any branches growing inwards or low to the ground
- Remove whole stems close to the base
- Always prune just above an outward-facing bud (pictured)
- Keep about 8-10 of the younger healthy stems
- Mulch plants with compost in early spring
Blackcurrants
Blackcurrants start producing fruits on one year old wood, but most fruit is produced on two year old stems. From year three, the stems are less productive. These are the ones to remove.
Each year, prune out up to one third of the oldest stems at the base. This encourages new stems to shoot from the base.
Young stems are thin and pale coloured as seen on the right of this picture. The old wood, on the left, is darker brown, rough and thicker. You might need loppers or a pruning saw to make a clean cut at the base.
There is no need to shorten any of the branches unless one is much taller than the others. If this is the case you can shorten it to make a more balanced shape.
Redcurrants, whitecurrants and gooseberries
These never fruit on one year old wood; most fruit will be produced on two and three year old wood. This means they don’t need to be pruned quite so severely as blackcurrants. You can take out a couple of the oldest stems. Some will have younger side shoots, so take out the ones with the fewest side shoots or those that will result in a more open centre. Shorten all of the remaining leading branches by a third to a half to encourage more fruits.
Propagation
You can make more plants by taking hardwood cuttings at the same time as winter pruning. It’s best to do this with younger plants. Older bushes may have viruses or diseases that will affect the health of the new plant.
Take 20-25 cm cuttings from pencil thick stems or side shoots that you have pruned out. Cut straight across the bottom just below a bud. You can take more than one cutting from each stem if it is long enough. In this case, make a sloped cut at the top just above a bud so that water runs off and you know which way up to plant them.
For blackcurrants keep all buds on. For the others, remove the lower buds, making sure you keep at least 3-4 that will be above the soil. Push each cutting around the edge of a pot of gritty compost or soil so that about 7-10 cm of the stem is buried. You can even plant them directly into a bed of soil. I’ve often just popped them into a corner of the veg patch. Firm them in so that the soil connects with the stem and water well.
Leave them outside and water in dry weather. They will form roots by summer and be ready to pot up individually or plant in their final position by autumn. They should produce fruit within three years, sometimes sooner.
The image to the right is a cutting from last year that I just removed from the pot of cuttings – you can see the established root structure.
You can also take hardwood cuttings from mulberry and fig trees. Give it a go and let us know how you get on.
Want more tips? Check out our other grow-your-own guides
Replenish 