Hi. I'm garden designer Angela Price from Eden Condensed Small Space Garden Design. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about pruning and I'm going to give you a couple examples on pruning a tree as well as pruning a grape vine. There's a lot of different tools you can use to prune plants and I have some example here of different types of trimmers. This is a hedge trimmer here, it's got long blades on it. There's a couple of different types of loppers. These are called loppers. They usually have longer handles but shorter blades that allow you to reach up to higher levels to prune. For roses you can us bypass shears. I like these a lot because they have a nice safety on them. When you close them you just click it back in and they stay closed. So you don't have to worry about cutting or poking yourself. And for very delicate plants these are called herb snips. You can use these to trim herbaceous plants like herbs that have very kind of delicate stems. So that way your not you know, you could also get into smaller areas too with these. Another really important thing when your pruning is to wear good gardening gloves. I happen to like these. They're kind of rubber on one side and cotton on the other side, so they breathe. But if you're going to be doing some really heavy duty pruning or doing something with roses where you have thorns or other plants that have thorns, you may want to invest in a more heavy duty set of work gloves or ones that are made of leather or suede. So this is a dwarf magnolia tree that's in my yard and although it's starting to come to a little bit of bud because these do start to flower in late winter, early spring, I've noticed that some of the branches are crossed which is not a good thing when in a tree. You want to make sure that the tree's getting enough air circulation and having crossed branches, especially when it starts to come in to leave, can actually cause parasites too or insects to be more attracted to it or harder to get rid of. So we're going to remove a couple of these branches today. And I brought both a longer lopper here as well as my shears. Since these branches are down low and my shears are pretty sharp, I'm going to go with the shears first. And you'll see this branch right here is crossing over this bigger branch. So I probably want to take this whole thing off. Down on the branch here it's not going to sprout anything else and it's not going to look very attractive if I just take part of it off. So I'm going to take it off down close to where it's coming. And you want to have about a thirty to forty five degree angle on there. And just give it a nice sharp cut. And it's important that you give it a nice sharp cut and that your tools are sharp. Because if it's ragged it can invite more infection into the tree. It's also a good idea to trim your trees once the tree's gone dormant or in the winter time where it's colder. So that way there's less risk for infection to the tree. And we'll take a look and see what else is going on here. You also want to take a step back from the tree and look and see what the shape of it's like. If the tree is not in the shape that you particularly care for then you want to start taking out some of the branches and retraining it. If it's getting too close to power lines or too close to your house, you may want to cut it back. But always take a step back and make sure that you've got the right shape and that it's even on all sides. I'm noticing here there's another branch here in the back that I'm going to take off and I'm just going to kind of lean in here and do that same angled cut and give it a nice sharp cut. And then that way it will not grow in to itself anymore. And I also have some bushes that are growing around here. I'd probably prune those off as well just to give the tree a little bit more air and a little bit more light. I also have a grapevine in my yard that I planted earlier this year and now that it's winter time most of it has died back. There's a few little leaves left on it. But what's important to get a good growth in the spring, of leaves and then fruit in the summer is that grapes like to be trimmed back hard. So if you have grapes or other berries in your yard you want to make sure that you trim them back. This also works well with roses. When you cut them back hard which means cut them back far, then it's important that that will get the juices kind of going with the plant in the spring and get it to leaf out in either flower or fruit depending on what type of plant you have. So looking at the grapevine here I want to go down to a place where there's little nubs here where potential branches will come out and I've got a trellis here. So I'm actually going to cut this back pretty far all the way down to where the trellis is and using my bypass pruners. Again, cutting on an angle and giving it a nice sharp cut. And then we can just discard that or put it in the compost pile. And there's another piece that came off that grew off of this side. And I'm going to bring that one down just a little further, right above the little nub here where a branch will grow out, and again give it a nice sharp cut. And we'll take that away. And lastly there's some down here that have some kind of residual leaves coming out of it. I don't really want those and there's some dead wood. You want to cut that off too. So if there's any actual dry wood or dead wood on it, you want to snip that off. Here's some of the old tendrils where it was growing up. I'm going to take those off and clean those up too. And then I'm also going to, in the pot, I'm going to take any of the dry leaves out of here. Having too many dry leaves will harbor mold and I don't want that getting into the potting soil or into the roots of the plant. If you have any other questions about how to prune, please contact me at edencondensed.com. Thank you very much.
home section
