 Hello and welcome to another QuickCrop video. Well today we're looking at pruning goose rebushes. Now pruning gooseberries and red currents or white currents is in fact exactly the same process but we do have a separate current video which you can also view on our YouTube channel. Well you can see behind me with the leafless trees that it's still winter. In fact it's the end of March and that's the perfect time to prune your gooseberries just before they come out of their dormant winter phase and this is because any pruning cuts that I make will quickly heal with the vigorous new growth of early spring. When I first started pruning it all seemed quite complicated but when you understand the basics it's actually pretty simple. The main point to remember is that the best fruit is produced on two to three year old branches. In the fourth year productivity will go down and it'll further decline as the years pass so it's pretty obvious really when you think about it no wood on the bush should be more than four years old. Anything older we prune out it's going to be replaced by new growth and that way the bush is constantly being renewed. Now you might think I've left a little bit late to prune my gooseberries because we can see the leaf buds opening as the plant comes back into life in spring but in fact I've left it late on purpose and this is because birds particularly bullfinches like to eat the winter buds and leaving this thorny second of branches helps protect the bush. Now before we start we want to get an idea of the shape of bush that we want when we finished our pruning and basically it's this open bull shape. We want an open center to the bush and then with the branches growing outward and away from the middle and the reason for this shape is it gives us plenty of air circulation which is going to help avoid milju. It allows plenty of light to ripen the fruit and it makes the bush easier to pick. Okay so let's get pruning now you really want to use a good sharp secateurs and if you have a number of fruit bushes or some fruit trees like pears or plums or apples it really is worth investing in some top quality equipment like these classic felco secateurs or also from felco these sharp bypass lopperes for the larger cuts. Okay so let's open up the center of the bush to get that nice bull shape that we were talking about. Now I'm going to start by taking out one of the larger branches in the middle and we can see by the dark color here that that's actually one of the older branches so a perfect one to remove. So we're going to get our loppers in here and we're going to remove him. So we can already see that with removing that one branch we've already created a bit of space there but now we need to remove any other branches any smaller ones that are growing into the center of the bush so we're going to take that one and this and that one. Now lastly we can start to adjust the yield of our bush if we want. If you've been getting a lot of small fruit and you'd prefer larger gooseberries what we can do is some sort of fine-tuning pruning at this stage and we're going to be concentrating on the side shoots. Now you can see here this is our main stem coming from the base of the bush coming from the root straight up there and that's the top of our main stem there and these branches coming off either side there are side shoots and we can prune them back as I said to adjust the yield so if you'd like to come over here I can show you where we're going to cut. We have darker bark here dark brown wood here and then this lighter wood the other side and that's the transition point from this is last year's growth that grew last season and this is the growth that was put down the season before so that's that's the joining point and we can actually see here we have a lot of little fruiting spurs there and what we can do is cut back this side shoot and what we want to do is cut it to about two or three buds from that joining point and when we're pruning we always prune after either an upward or an outward facing bud we don't want to prune a low hanging bud like that because that's going to give us a branch pointing downwards or we don't want to prune a bud that's going to give us a branch that grows into the center of the bush which obviously we've just cleaned out so I'm going to prune just above this guy here so we can see we're about two or three buds really in from the inside and I'm going to cut him across there so that's it I hope it wasn't too complicated we're going to have to speed things up now because I think we're going to lose the weather now it's starting to rain so the bush that we've just pruned that's actually a three year old bush and it's a good example of a bush that needs training this bowl shape for future fruiting so next year in the fourth year and every year after that I'm going to be removing the four year old wood and that gives us our new supply of fresh fruiting branches now you'll recognize the four year old wood because it would tend to be thicker it'll be darker in color and also from four years onwards you're going to start to see a little bit of peeling bark so you should be able to identify them and prune them out now just before we go I'm going to do another bush really quickly just to go through those steps again to try and get fresh in your mind okay let's get going now step one if we remember are there any large branches just clogging up the center of the tree and the answer is yes we have one big one here so I'm going to take him out lovely okay and then are we looking we're now looking for any branches that are growing into the center so take those out and again we're snipping those right back to where those side shoots are joining the main branch we clean that out and we can see already we're starting to get this nice open bowl shape here you can come out too okay so that's looking a lot better already and now step three and actually I forgot to mention at the first time is that we need to look for any dead, damaged or diseased wood now this bush is actually a three year old so everything seems fine there there's nothing really to take out but in older bushes you will see some dead wood there'll be no leaves on it or no no buds on it diseased wood that can happen when two branches are rubbing and some diseases got in there so just keep an eye out for that and then prune it out and the next step then step four if you remember we're looking for any crossing branches any that are competing for the same space within the bush and then any low hanging branches that might trail on the ground and of course those suckers which are the little shoots that come up down beside the root of the plant and I've got three here so I'm just going to take those out and that's right down to soil level there that's them gone when I look now down into the bush I can see that this branch here is directly above the one underneath and I can see by the color of the one underneath which is lighter that it's a younger branch so they're competing for the same sunlight if you know what I mean and so I'm going to take out the bigger one sometimes it seems a bit of a shame because it's a nice big healthy branch but it's going to be good in the long run so snipping him out and now look we've got this lovely big open space then in the bush so I'm just going to finish off then just by adjusting the fruiting a little bit and I'm going to start pruning some of my side shoots here and again I'm pruning last year's growth just down to two buds above where the join is from the previous year's growth and as with all the pruning I'm looking for buds that are growing upwards or outwards away from the center of the bush I think the rain's coming now so I'm just going to finish this off and we'll see you later okay that's it now it's all pretty easy and whatever you do you're not going to ruin your gooseberry bush beyond repair and even if you only did step one and removed all the four-year-old wood every year you will vastly increase both the quality and the quantity of your gooseberry fruit now if you'd like to watch any other videos on fruit and vegetable growing do check out our quick crop YouTube channel and if you'd like to purchase anything for your fruit and vegetable growing adventure we can supply anything you need on our quick crop websites quickrop.ae and quickrop.co.uk I'll see you next time