TEN ESSENTIAL PRUNING TIPS
Do It Now (or Soon, Usually)
An ideal time to prune most trees and shrubs is just as their buds are swelling, which is just about now here on my farmden. Leafless stems make it easy to see where to cut, dead stems make their presence known, and with coldest weather past chances for cold damage near cuts are minimized. Warmer spring weather also promotes rapid healing of cuts.
Whole books have been written about pruning (I even wrote one!: THE PRUNING BOOK), yet the essence of pruning can be distilled into a few general pointers. The ten listed below will not result in an expert pruning job, but offer sufficient guidance to keep you and your plants reasonably happy.
1. Don’t cut unless you have a clear reason to do so. Trees and shrubs vary in their needs for pruning, from, for example, Japanese maple and witch hazel, which need no regular pruning, to butterfly bush and lilac, which need to be pruned every year to look their best.
Japanese maple’s rarely need pruning
WITH GOOD REASON, FAMILIES MIGRATE AROUND MY GARDEN
(Excerpt from The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden, available directly from this website, signed, or from the usual sources.)
Who is Coming?
How many families am I having over to the vegetable garden this summer? I have to plan their seating arrangements.
I’m talking about plant families. An example of a plant family is the Mustard Family, known botanically as the Cruciferae, and including among its members cabbage, broccoli, collards, and Brussels sprouts. Their similarly pungent flavors and waxy, bluish leaves might also have earmarked them as being in the same family. Then again, the different parts eaten—the swollen stalks of kohlrabi, the leaves of cabbage, and the flower buds of broccoli— might indicate otherwise.
Most important in uniting this family, and the primary characteristic that botanically unites members of any plant family, is Read more
THE DARKER SIDE OF TINKERBELL
They’re Cute, Though
The bugs is comin’! The bugs is comin’! Just as sure as the sun is rising higher in the sky each day, the hope of spring is awakening all sorts of pesky little buggers on houseplants. One by one, they are showing their faces: mites, aphids, mealybugs, scale insects, and white flies.
I’d actually consider whiteflies — the target of today’s hunt — to be cute if they weren’t plant pests. The same surely could not be said for drab mealybugs and scale insects, or for mites, the latter because you can hardly see them at all.
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