One of the most important tasks to ensure that a garden is at its best during the summer months is pruning. You may choose to use a commercial garden maintenance company in Victoria BC such as West Coast Evergreen Gardening, or may prefer to do it yourself, but what is the best approach for pruning to help your garden look its best all year?
Pruning is perhaps the most confusing aspect of gardening, with a lot of misunderstanding about what it’s for and how to go about it. After all, the idea is to essentially cut away often perfectly healthy parts of a plant or tree to shape how it grows or promote new growth. That can seem drastic, and in fact over pruning is real, and can be as harmful as not pruning at all. So how do you find the balance?
Different plant types do require different approaches, but there are some common ideas that can help create your own pruning approach.
1) Remove any dead material quickly
Whatever your views on the best approach to pruning, always cut back dead areas of plants. Whether it is a tree branch or dead leaves on an evergreen, it is important to remove them. This is because that, especially for trees, that dead part is a wound that can lead to rot or infection.
2) Make angled cuts
For many years it was though flush cuts were the best approach to pruning both trees and plants, as this offered the smallest surface area left to heal. However, modern experts suggest that an angled cut, leaving a circular, rather than oval surface, contains the potential for infection and decay and helps the plant maintain health better.
3) Thin with restraint
Whether thinning out tree branches or the leaves of a shrub, the idea that less is more holds true. Over thinning can leave a plant traumatized and unable to recover properly, so much so it can as much as half the plant’s life as a result. Thinning allows a plant to maintain health by allowing light through to the core, but it should be used with care.
A commercial garden maintenance company is often a good option
The big question for many, whether it is a garden at a Strata complex,
Not only does a commercial garden maintenance service have the specialized tools to perform tasks such as tree pruning in a safe and effective manner, but they can also schedule maintenance programs for your specific
When its time for irrigation start up in spring and your garden begins to come back to life, pruning is high on the agenda, but whether you call in the experts or not, it stills needs care and planning to get it right.
Contact West Coast Evergreen Gardening when looking for professional pruning results.