Want to get your plants looking their best? Here are some great garden pruning tips from our very own Kevin Prall! Doing this extra bit of landscaping maintenance will really add a visual pop!
Transcription (with some slight alterations)
Hi everybody, Kevin from Eichenlaub coming from our backyard here. Hey today we’re going to be talking about pruning practices. Things that you’ll want to do to your plant that will really help keep their form, keep them healthy and get them going in the right direction. Like with all plants, it’s probably really good to start when they’re younger and develop good structure as they grow.
Things to look for when it comes to pruning
- Broken branches
- Branches that look like they’re dying
- Branches that are crossing and rubbing each other, because that’s always going to add problems. It can lead to diseases to get into the plant
- Branches that are growing upward inside the plant, that could potentially be crossing in the future
And then after we go for all those things, then we can step back and look at the structure of the plant to see how we want to shape it, and see what would aesthetically please us.
So, this one is a really good example of a plant that I really haven’t touched all summer, and I do need to get into it. This particular plant I can prune just about any time. Probably don’t want to do much after the end of August because I don’t want to force a lot of growth that would happen later in the season (as it could get frost in the fall).
Here’s a really good example of a branch that’s growing inwards, it’s going up all the way in this part of the branch. This branch is really tight, it could cause some rubbing here, it’s also growing up inward in the plant which could cause some crossing and rubbing higher up in the canopy. So what you want to do is take the branch down and out close to what we call the ‘collar’. We want to prune to just in front of that because when we cut down to that point, there’s a tissue in that area which really heals quickly within that collar so it really helps with that wound within a season or two. If we cut into that collar it reduces the ability of that plant to really repair itself and fix the damage we’ve caused. So try to cut to the collar but not into the collar.
Next, Kevin moves to pruning the “Knockout Roses”
This is actually the second flush of bloom I’ve had this year. This flush was in June, I’ve cut them back and here they are flushing again. You can get multiple blooms by doing this every year. Here’s a good example of what I do, notice where they come to an intersection and then go one or two stems below that. You want to cut to where a bud is pointing in the direction you want to go. This leaf is going left so when I cut it, the bud will break in the same direction. Within 2-3 days I’ll notice that bud breaking, and probably in a period of 2-3 weeks there will be another stem with a bunch of blooms on it.
It’s a little bit of maintenance with your roses, but if you want blooms all summer long, it’s something that you’ll want to do.
If you need help with plant pruning, or maybe you just want to find out how to improve your outdoor living space, then get in contact with the team at Eichenlaub.
