8 Step Raspberry Glen Ample Autumn Pruning Routine with Felco 2 Secateurs on a Cane Row

Step one: identify which raspberry you are actually cutting

Before the Felco 2 touches a single cane, settle the variety question, because the entire routine forks here. Primocane types such as Autumn Bliss, Polka and Joan J fruit on canes grown the same season; floricane types such as Glen Ample and Tulameen fruit on canes grown the previous year. Confusing the two costs you a full harvest. A Glen Ample row cut to the ground in autumn produces zero fruit the following summer, because the floricanes you just removed were the ones carrying next year’s crop.

The tell is the wood. Primocanes are green and pliable late in the season, often still carrying fruit into October. Floricanes that have already fruited are brown, woody, and frequently peeling at the base. On a mixed or unlabelled row, mark the canes that fruited this year with a loop of jute twine before you start, so the pruning logic stays visible once leaves drop and every cane looks similarly bare against the wire.

Step two: sharpen and adjust the Felco 2 before the first cut

A Felco 2 cuts canes up to roughly 25mm cleanly, but only with a blade that has been touched up on the supplied Felco 902 sharpening stone or an equivalent. A dull bypass blade crushes the cane wall instead of slicing it, and a crushed primocane stub at the crown is an open invitation for cane blight and spur blight, both fungal, both happy to overwinter in damaged tissue.

Check the blade-anvil gap with the adjustment key that ships with the tool. If the central bolt has loosened over a season, the two cutting surfaces drift apart and the cane folds rather than parts. Tighten until there is no lateral wobble at the blade tip but the action still closes under thumb pressure. Wipe the blade with methylated spirit between rows if you have any suspicion of disease, because secateurs are the single most efficient vector for moving spores down a cane row, faster than wind or splash.

Step three: cut autumn-fruiting canes to the ground

For primocane varieties, the routine is brutal and simple. Once fruiting finishes and the first hard frosts have knocked the foliage back, cut every cane to within 5cm of soil level. No selection, no thinning, no judgement about which canes look strongest. The whole stool comes down.

This works because next season’s fruiting wood has not grown yet. It will emerge fresh from the crown and root system in spring, fruit by late summer, and the cycle repeats. Cutting low rather than leaving 30cm stubs matters more than it looks: tall stubs harbour overwintering larvae of the raspberry cane midge and give cane blight a foothold above the moisture line. The flush of new primocanes in April will be denser and more vigorous from a clean, low cut than from a row left half-standing.

Time this for late autumn, not early. Cutting while the canes are still green and photosynthesising robs the crown of the sugars it is busy storing for the spring push. Wait until the leaves have genuinely senesced and the canes have given up their green.

Step four: thin floricane rows to the strongest canes

Glen Ample and other summer-fruiting raspberries demand the opposite hand. Remove only the canes that fruited this year, cutting them to ground level, and leave this season’s new primocanes standing to fruit next summer. Then thin those survivors. Aim for six to eight strong canes per stool, or roughly one cane every 10cm along a wire row, removing the spindliest and any that are damaged, kinked, or growing into the row path.

Thicker is not better past a point. A crowded floricane row holds humidity, shades its own fruiting laterals, and turns picking into a fight. The canes you keep should be pencil-thick or stouter, with clean bark and no sign of the silvery cracking that signals cane blight at the base.

Step five: take tip cuttings from the prunings

The canes you just removed are not all waste. Raspberries propagate readily from the vigorous primocane tips that arch over and self-layer where they touch soil, and you can force this deliberately. Select healthy primocane sections about 15cm long, strip the lower leaves, and push them into a gritty cutting compost in a cold frame. By next autumn a fair proportion will have rooted into transplantable canes, true to the parent variety because raspberries do not come true from seed.

This is also how virus moves through a collection, so only propagate from stock that has shown no leaf mottling, yellow vein netting, or stunted, brittle growth across the season. A visibly clean parent is the entire safeguard here. Tip layering an obviously sickly plant simply multiplies the problem across the new row, and there is no cure once raspberry viruses are systemic.

Step six: feed and mulch the cleared row

With the canes down and the row visible, work along the base. Pull annual weeds by hand near the crowns, because a hoe blade nicks the shallow raspberry roots that run within the top 15cm of soil. A surface dressing of well-rotted manure or garden compost, laid 5cm deep but kept clear of direct contact with the crowns, feeds the spring growth and suppresses weed germination through winter.

Raspberries prefer a slightly acidic soil, somewhere around pH 6.0 to 6.5, and dislike the alkaline conditions that lock up iron and manganese. If your prunings this season showed interveinal yellowing on young leaves, the row is likely too alkaline and would benefit from an ericaceous-style acidifying mulch such as composted bracken or pine needles, the same logic that keeps a camellia from going chlorotic in hard-water districts. Do not lime a raspberry row on general principle, which is a common reflex that backfires.

Step seven: check and retension the support wires

A neglected wire row sags under a season of cane weight and crop. With the canes either gone or thinned, the structure is exposed and easy to service.

Step eight: tie in the retained floricanes

The floricanes left standing in step four need securing before winter gales whip them against each other and split the bark. Space them evenly along the top wire and tie with soft jute or a figure-of-eight of garden twine, never tight wire, which girdles the expanding cane by midsummer. On a two-wire system, fan the canes so no two cross, which keeps air moving through the row and cuts the standing humidity that cane blight needs to establish.

For varieties that throw very long canes, such as Tulameen, loop the tips over and tie them down to the top wire in a low arch rather than letting a metre of cane wave free. The arch concentrates fruiting laterals along an accessible line and stops the wind-rock that loosens the whole stool at the root. By the time growth restarts, every retained cane is anchored, spaced, and pointing where you want next summer’s fruit to hang.

What the routine does not settle is the unlabelled inherited row, where some stools clearly fruited late on green wood and others on brown two-year canes in the same bed. Whether that bed is a deliberate primocane-floricane mix or simply two varieties planted together by a previous owner changes whether step three or step four applies to each plant, and the only way to know is to watch a full fruiting season before the Felco comes out at all.