Pruning needn’t be a scary thing, but we understand that it can feel like a chore, or can be a bit overwhelming if you’re just starting out with a fruit garden. Gooseberry bushes are probably the easiest in terms of pruning, mainly because they won’t need pruning for the first four to five years. You can simply plant them up when they arrive, either in the ground or in containers, and let them grow and become established.
There are lots of methods for pruning in later years, but we like to keep things simple and this is how we’d tackle it: From year five onwards, remove a fifth of your gooseberry bush in winter – this is done by cutting out the oldest and lowest wood from the base. So, if the plant had twenty five stems, you would remove the five oldest looking, woody stems. As you are pruning, just bear in mind that you want to keep any new stems and one-year old stems as these will be the ones that produce fruit in subsequent years.
