The Right Time to Head into your Garden with your Tree Pruning Shears
There are lots of chores around the yard that usually pile up through winter. Frigid weather can easily discourage anyone from going outside – even for basic maintenance around the yard.
What that means is usually a garden that is untidy and overrun when spring turns up. How do you go about getting everything looking tidy once again when the weather begins to permit a little yard work?
Here’s what you do with your tree pruning, cropping, snipping and shearing.
Gardening enthusiasts don’t always understand the whole logic to how tree pruning or the pruning of a shrub or bush is supposed to work.
It is for this reason that they often time their tree pruning exercises all wrong, timing it for around fall each year. It can really harm a tree or plant to lose its branches around fall. Pruning is supposed to occur around the time that a plant is ready to bloom forth.
Fall is the time plants prepare for winter and cut back on their functions. For most plants and trees therefore, spring or shortly before it, is the right time. There are a few exceptions though – flowering species like the Peony or the Day Lily for instance.
There is considerable disagreement over the pruning method that is best for ornamental grasses. Some gardeners express the opinion that if they don’t cut, they will never be tall and beautiful in spring.
Other gardeners enjoy the way their ornamental grasses look in their gardens in the winter and hope to keep them uncut.
The best advice you can have in the matter should come from the nursery where you got your grasses in the first place. Things do differ from species to species.
You can even search on the Internet if you know the specific names of the grasses you have. As a rule, early spring happens to be a great time for pruning grasses. Do it right before the new shoots arrived, and it will help them establish themselves.
As for plants and shrubs that bloom first thing in spring, you should prune right after their first blooms come out. This helps them bloom for the longest time every season. In shrubs that put out flowers in the summer, the pruning can occur following spring.
The Black-Eyed Susan, the Aster and many other flowering plants are great to be pruned in the spring.
Early spring or late winter is about the best time to prune landscape trees as well. It’s about the time they are ready to grow – right after winter. And pruning does little damage.
Prune your trees right before spring starts, and you’ll probably have a tree that is more vibrant and lush than ever.
