8 Step Currant Ben Connan Pruning Routine with Felco 2 Secateurs on a Bush Row
Ben Connan blackcurrants fruit on wood that is one to three years old. The Felco 2 secateurs handle stems up to about 25mm, which covers nearly every cut on an established bush. This eight step sequence works across a planted row in late winter, while the plant is dormant and the framework is visible.
Late winter is the working window for Ben Connan, a compact Scottish-bred blackcurrant released by the James Hutton Institute. The bush rarely exceeds 1.2m, which makes it a common choice for tighter beds and large containers. Pruning happens between leaf fall and bud break, when the framework stands bare and you can read the age of each stem by its colour. New wood is pale and tan. Three-year-old wood is dark, almost black, and that contrast is the single most useful signal during the cuts that follow.
Read the bush before the first cut
Walk the length of the row and look at each plant from the side, low down. Ben Connan fruits most heavily on stems grown the previous summer and on two-year-old wood. By the third year a stem produces less and its bark darkens noticeably. The aim across the whole bush is a rough balance: keep most of the one- and two-year-old growth, remove a portion of the oldest. On an established plant of four or five years, that usually means taking out a quarter to a third of the total stem count each season.
Count the main stems coming from the base. A productive Ben Connan carries somewhere between eight and twelve. If you find fifteen or more, the centre is congested and airflow is poor, which raises the risk of mildew on the lower leaves in a damp summer. Mark the darkest, thickest stems mentally before you start, because those are the candidates for removal in the steps below.
Step one and two: the dead and the crossing
Start with anything dead, broken, or clearly diseased. These cuts cost the plant nothing and clear your sightlines. Cut back to live wood, identified by a green or cream-coloured core when you nick the bark with the Felco 2 blade. Brown or hollow centres mean the stem is gone above that point.
The second pass targets stems that cross and rub. Where two branches touch, summer wind grinds the bark and opens a wound. Remove the weaker or the more awkwardly placed of the pair, cutting it back to its origin at the base or to a strong outward-facing junction. On Ben Connan the habit is fairly upright, so crossing is less of a problem than on spreading varieties, but a congested base still produces a few rubbing pairs each year.
Step three: take out the oldest third
This is the structural cut and the one that keeps the bush productive year after year. Locate the darkest stems, the three-year-old and older wood. Cut these right down to the base, as close to ground level as the secateurs reach, ideally within 2cm of the crown. The angled blade of the Felco 2 lets you get low without leaving a stub that rots back into the stool.
Removing the oldest wood does two things at once. It frees light and air for the younger stems, and it pushes the plant to throw fresh shoots from the base in spring, which become next year’s fruiting wood. On a five-year-old Ben Connan carrying ten stems, taking out three of the oldest leaves seven, a workable framework. Do not strip every old stem in a single year on a plant that is already weak. Spread the renewal over two seasons if the bush looks tired or the previous summer was dry.
Resist the urge to shorten the young stems you keep. Blackcurrants are not spur-pruned like apples. Tipping the one-year-old wood removes the very buds that carry the heaviest crop. Leave those stems full length unless they are damaged at the tip.
The cut surface on a base removal should sit flush with the swollen junction at the crown. A clean angled cut sheds rain and heals faster than a ragged one, which is why blade sharpness matters more here than on any other step. A Felco 2 blade honed with the matching Felco 903 sharpener parts the dark old wood in a single squeeze instead of crushing it.
Work around the full circumference of the stool so the remaining stems are spaced, not clustered on one side. An even crown produces an even canopy and an even crop.
A note on blade angle
Hold the secateurs so the cutting blade, not the anvil, sits against the part you keep. The thin blade leaves the cleaner face on the retained stem.
Step four through six: thinning, low growth, and the centre
With the oldest wood gone, thin any remaining clusters where three or more stems emerge from a single point at the base. Keep the strongest one or two and remove the rest at origin. Ben Connan tends to send up plenty of basal shoots, so there is usually surplus to take.
Next, deal with low and trailing growth. Any stem arching down toward the soil will splash with rain, pick up soil-borne spores, and drop fruit into the mud. Cut these back to an upward-pointing bud or remove them entirely. The goal is a base that sits clear of the ground by at least 10cm, which also makes mulching with well-rotted manure in early spring far easier.
The centre of the bush comes last in this group. Reach into the middle and remove one or two inward-growing stems to open the heart of the plant. Open-centre form is the standard target for gooseberries and redcurrants, and blackcurrants benefit from the same airflow even though their renewal pruning differs. Light reaching the inner buds improves fruit set on the lower part of each retained stem.
Step seven and eight: tidy the cuts and clear the row
Go back over every cut you have made and check for stubs. A stub longer than about 1cm is a dieback entry point. Trim flush. On the thicker base cuts, run a thumb over the surface, any crushing or torn bark means the cut needs redoing cleaner, and the Felco 2 will do it if the blade is sharp.
Clear all prunings from the row immediately. Blackcurrant big bud mite overwinters in swollen, rounded buds that look fatter and more globular than the slim pointed healthy ones. If you spotted any during the cuts, those stems should already be in the removal pile. Burn or bin the prunings; do not compost material from a bush with suspected mite, because the pest moves to fresh growth in spring as buds open. A clean row also denies slugs and overwintering fungal bodies a damp hiding place against the stools.
A worked example across a six-plant row
Take a row of six Ben Connan planted 1.5m apart, all four years old. Across the six, you might find roughly sixty main stems, an average of ten each. The oldest-third rule targets around twenty stems for base removal, but they will not be evenly spread. Two vigorous plants might carry thirteen stems with five old ones each; a weaker plant at the shaded end might carry seven with only two worth removing.
Work plant by plant, not by a fixed number. On the vigorous pair, take the five oldest each and leave eight. On the shaded plant, take two and leave five, then mulch it more generously to push spring growth. The total removed across the row lands near twenty, but the distribution follows each plant’s vigour. A row pruned to a single rigid count produces uneven bushes within two seasons, with the strong ones congesting and the weak ones stalling.
Time the whole row at roughly eight to twelve minutes per established plant once the sequence is familiar. The bottleneck is the base cuts, which is exactly where a sharp Felco 2 earns its place over a blunt anvil pair that bruises the dark wood.
When the wood does not match the colour rule
Colour reading works on healthy plants in normal seasons. After a drought summer, even one-year-old wood can look darker and more weathered than expected, and the age signal blurs. The harder question is what to do with a bush whose growth has been so checked by dry weather that there is no fresh pale wood to keep at all. Does the oldest-third rule still apply when the youngest third is barely there?
