In my experience, you shouldn't have very much dead wood on a 5 year old blueberry shrub. Have you checked soil pH lately? That said, blueberries respond well to pruning, meaning that they seem to recover quickly, and grow back vigorously. As usual we have significant rabbit damage to some of our shrubs, so I might have to eat those words in a few months...Rabbits are really hard on blueberry shrubs, they take all of the fresh growth, all of the buds, and leave only the older heavy branches.

Thats a good point about the PH. I do supplement plenty of soil sulfur, peat moss, and copperas. the ph tested around 6 last fall. I just have one of those quick test gadgets. The plant produced a decent ammount of fruit last year. I do think it need pruning though. It is a little concercing that it didnt produce any new shoots last year. Im not sure if this will hurt it more than just leaving it alone.

You need to generate reasonable new growth every year on all types of fruit plants and you should be concerned if the blueberries didn't send out a surplus of fresh green shoots.

How you prune them is much less important than diagnosing what is stopping your plants from thriving. Most likely they are either too wet or too dry as BB's have no tolerance for either but are more tolerant of a higher pH than what the literature suggests. Low 6's should be fine if soil is high in organic matter and mulched.

Another thing that will runt out blueberries is allowing them to crop too much for their age and vigor. You probably should forgo fruit next year on the runt and remove all the flowers until it begins growing normally.

Of course all dead and nearly dead wood should be removed.

Thanks for the info harvestman. I dont think I have ever mulched deep enough aruond my blueberry bushes. Im really going to work on getting that deeper. I built the bushes up on small mounds to allow more drainage since I live in clay country. Im sure some of my problem the last few years with the bushes has been not enough water. I use lots of compost and worm castings along with peat moss and cotton bur compost in the holes for plantings. I did miscalculate though it has 4 or 5 side shoots around the crown. It didnt have any new growth though last year, all the existing wood has bark.
So any blueberry bush should receive shoot growth each year? I really need to get an irrigation system setup for my bushes. I have designed a pvc sytem that I hope to get in the ground this spring. It runs off a rain barrel.

On another note my currants did receive any new growth either last year. All of there shoots are woody. HMM. thanks for you help,brandon

Small mounds can be tricky for blueberrie's very shallow rootsystem. Clay will actually pull water from your coarser mounds and BB roots won't go far enough to retrieve it.

Raised beds are better (4 to 5' wide for entire length of row) as they will take longer to dry out and are more easily wetted.

I believe that a leaf based compost is better than peat, although I use both to amend soil for BB's. Peat is not yet digested and is loaded with carbohydrate that gets broken down quickly once mixed with soil. Compost has much better staying power as easy accessed energy has already been digested and volume reduced.

Peat practiacally disappears after a couple of years if it gets wet and well mixed with other soil. If it is not thoroughly mixed, which is very hard to do if you don't pre-moisten it, it tends to stay dry in clods in the ground and accomplishes nothing for the plants. The roots can't go there.