North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Mark & Helen Angermayer" <hangermayer@isp.com>]

Last spring I planted some triple crown blackberries and built a trellis (4
wires).  Despite the Easter freeze and borers, the vines have shown
tremendous vigor.  There are several canes attached to each wire.  In fact
the top wire has a large bundle of canes I tied together throughout the
summer.  It's a jumbled mess of canes.  My question:  What do you folks do
when the new canes start coming up in the spring?  Do you just tie them to
the existing bundles?  And then when it's time to prune out the old floral
canes, how do you do it?  It would seem to me to be a very tedious task to
cut loose all the canes (that are all tied together) cut out the floral
canes, and then retie the new primocanes.  Surely there is an easier way?

I'm thinking about alternating the use of the trellis wires.  In other words
use the bottom two wires one year, and the top two the next.  That way
primocanes and floral canes could be kept separate.  Would this be a
solution?

Mark
KS