Department: Fruit
Worked with Pavlina on the National Ribes collection. The whole collection has been re-propped as it is old and will be moved to a new site 100m away that has been green manured with clover. Moving them is apparently good to do like rotating vegetables but just a longer rotation. They probably should have been re-propped when they were in their prime, as some of them haven't taken so well. We staked new plants (2 yrs old) and started the beginnings of training them as cordons if they are big enough (generally 4 - 5 long enough stems). We tied one good strong stem (generally not from the base) to the cane as the leader. We tried to train the plants as straight as possible from the main stem. Then we cut each long side shoot down to 5 leaves roughly) from the base upwards, including the basal leaves depending on the length of the internodes and the amount of nodes - at least around 4, and the length of side stem left). We also did this to 1 yr plants in prop. that were in pots. They hope to plant these out this autumn.