 Good morning. Just going to talk a little bit about pruning blueberries for production. I know my slide says blueberries, blackberries, and muscadines, but I've hidden some slides and we'll work through that. So remember the three T's of pruning. It's going to be tools, timing, and technique. This is going to be very important from start to finish on your plants, whether they're, you know, two days old or two months old to, you know, 20 years and you just bought a house or you just bought a place that has, that had blueberries in the past and nothing's been done to them. So why do we prune the blueberries? One, we want to develop a good plant structure. This is going to help you in production. We're going to control that plant size because we don't want to pick anything off of the ladder, especially if you're not, if you're a homeowner, small, you pick, you don't want all your production to be eight foot, nine foot off the ground. We're going to control that fruit number and size by pruning. It'll aid in harvesting and disease and insect control because we need to open that canopy. We need to let air movement through it and we need to be able to, if we have to apply any pesticides or anything, then we can, we can get good coverage. So pruning blueberries, we'd like to thank Tony Glover. This is some of his slides that I've, I've used in Chippies to send me some pictures. So just going ahead and getting that, that out there. We're going to, a little pruning is required for the first few years. And then we want to remove those low hanging branches, dead diseased wood. Usually at any time on diseased or broken wood, we don't want those routes for disease entry to just go through the year. Keep these to a mature height around six feet or less. Mainly we want to make it, make it easy for yourself or your clientele. If you're a upick, shorter plants are easier to harvest, you know, kind of make sense. You know, we'll use that, that superpower, a common sense here. And, and then new vigorous shoots produce larger fruit. So if you look out at your blueberry plants now and you've got a pink kind of hue to those rows to those plants and everything. You've got some good young wood that's going to bear some nice fruit this year. You know, tools, you know, there's always the right tool for everything. We go from the silky sauce to your Felco pruners. And you can use any Corona's a good brand Felco am Leonard. We don't get any kickbacks from any of these companies. We just use quality products and that hold up a lot of these you can buy replacement blades for. Just know that if I'm going with a hand pruner, that's anything that's going to be three quarters of an inch or less. If I'm, then I need to move up to a locker. If I'm going to go, you know, two inches in diameter to that, to that three quarter and then anything over two inches. You're going to have to go more to a saw, whether it be a folding saw or a fixed blade saw. If you do pull out the saw there. Just know that these are back cut saws they only cut when you pull back on them so don't try to push in. I've had cases where clients have said well, you know the battery operated cut off saws. That's what I use. And it's okay. But I don't know if my video got cut off. But once we stop this I'll show you what those battery operated saws can do to a plan at times. And how I discourage folks from using those. So timing depends on the purpose. If we're trying to make it. If we're doing a renewal. Then we're going to best time to prune rabbit eye blueberries is going to be winter which is now February. March we don't want to do it too late. And I've got a slide later on height control some summer pruning. We're going to do this right after harvest so some post harvest pruning can be done to reduce some height. It can delay blooming. If you if you do this too late. So this is something that I wouldn't just go out if you had 100 plants and go out and do every one of them the first year I'm going to do post harvest pruning this year. And I don't care what they say, pick you a few plants go out there, make you some post harvest prune pruning cuts and and see how your plant reacts. So you kind of know that that plant and the way it's going to react to your to your post harvest pruning. So kind of a window prune summary is at planning we're going to do very little pruning. During establishment this is the two to three years. Very little, you know maybe some lower branches maybe some week shoots that are that are coming up. You know if there's damage, you know we get wildlife damage. If you're trying to keep cleaned around them and everything then you're, you may get some mechanical damage from equipment or, or stuff and then sometimes they just, you know we we have have other issues. After your harvest. This is July to August is when we want to do that post harvest pruning. And then those renewal cuts. That's late February to early March. And then sprout removal that's that's anytime if you're trying to keep that that form of that plant and not going to let it grow in a hedgerow. You're going to try to establish individual plants to where they have space in between them. This sprout removal can happen at any time. We're just going to cut those off at the ground. But you know, when we're making renewal cuts sometimes letting some of these sprouts replace some of those can be can be helpful. Remove damaged or dead branches anytime. I can't stress that enough. We see that a lot, especially in our area with wildlife damage, you know you're going to get deer in there. And they're going to decide they want to rub their antlers on your blueberry plants or they're running through there because you know they're chasing each other around and everything and they're breaking limbs and everything. Go ahead and prune those off if you see them because we don't want those routes for disease entry. We're going to remove renewal pruning done late before this plant blooms. Done on mature plants that's four to five years old. And we're going to remove about 20-25% of the oldest canes at the base of the plants and I have a picture coming up that Chip has sent me. So here's a picture for no pruning for about 17 years or so. This is just a hedgerow and this is what we deal with a lot of times where blueberries are a lot of work if you want good production and they just let them go. You can see there's, find my cursor here, we'll find right there. There's been some cuts made that's probably three or four years old right there. If you can see my pointer, but it's a, you'll get small berries, your production is going to be out of reach it's going to be up high. You get a lot of interior shading, you get increased pest problems and high water needs because if you're running your drip irrigation, you're going to, you're going to have to put more water. There's more plant there to support. And so it's going to just increase those needs. So we talked a lot about renewal cuts and this is one of the things that, that a lot of blueberry growers. I guess it's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard to do because they see that good thick stem that healthy plant. And, and it's got some lichens on it, which is not going to hurt anything that's just natural their filters, but they don't want to cut those. I don't want to cut that big stem, I don't want to cut that big stalk. And, but we have to. All right, we have to, they're not meant to be trees. So you can see where this has taken, it looks about 50% of that where they've taken and done a renewal cut, probably a couple of seasons ago. And on the right hand side of this picture and you can see where that new growth that advantageous budding has, has pushed out and created new shoots and everything that will give better production. Now, some of those need thinned out. And, and then the next season they're going to renew, make some renewal cuts on that left hand side, and we can do some height tricks here. And then we want every year, we want to remove some of that oldest canes. If they form bark and have lichens on them, they're, they're probably needing renewal cuts happen to them. We're going to go six to 18, 18 inches above the soil level to make these cuts. Just a few good references here. We have the aces pruning and training small fruits. It is there we have our YouTube fresh from the field videos. We have our publications where training and pruning fruit trees also Texas A&M has a pruning brochure that's very informative on that it's a good put together publication there. And just some final thoughts from me and I'll get to some questions. Remember pruning is just as much art form art form as it is a science. Bad pruning is worse than no pruning. Pruning is only a temporary solution for a permanent problem. Don't ever top a tree and crepe murder should be criminal offense with jail time. Don't be scared. And for the most part, you won't kill it.