A “no prune” production system in ‘Marion’ — sustainability, hardiness, and pest management

A series of treatments in a ‘Marion’ blackberry field were used to determine how sustainable a “no prune” system would be in commercial production. There were several years of plot comparisons between old floricanes overlapped with primocanes and the traditional, full floricane removal and training primocane method. Sustainability, cold hardiness, and disease and insect impacts were all part of this study.

Preliminary findings:

There are obvious cost and labor savings to be made by using the “no-prune” training method over the conventional system.
The “no prune” treatments tended to have higher yields especially after cold winters due to apparent increased cold hardiness.
No difference in disease incidence was documented between the two systems.
No increase in beneficial insect populations were observed in the “no Prune” systems as was initially proposed.
Note: Although our results so far are inconclusive, we do not recommend machine harvesting the “no prune” system due to the increased risk of thorn contamination of fruit.