How to Use a Bypass Pruner to Prune Trees

Series Summary

Trees, shrubs, and hedges in your home garden have not only aesthetic appeal because of their beauty but also are very practical. Trees offer shade from the sun, and hedges provide privacy for your yard. These plants however, must be well taken care of to continue to provide their beauty and function. Tree pruning is an essential part of landscape maintenance that must be done regularly to ensure that your trees continue to look beautiful and grow a large healthy canopy. Similarly, hedge trimming is necessary to make sure the hedge maintains its size and shape. If you would like to learn how to prune the trees and shrubs in your home garden landscape, how to trim your hedges, as well as general landscape maintenance tips, learn for free, online, from one of our experts.

In this free online video series, learn from expert horticulturalist Scott Reil as he teaches and demonstrates tree, shrub, and garden maintenance techniques. Learn how to prune large and small branches on your trees, how to prune shrubs, how to trim hedges, about making compost, how to compost your garden beds, how to mulch your garden beds, how to use Rhododendrons and Azaleas in your garden, how to choose Japanese Maples, how to feed or fertilize your trees and shrubs - all in this free video series.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Scott Reel and on behalf of expertvillage.com I'd like to talk to you about tree and shrub maintenance. Let's take a couple of minutes and talk to you about pruning trees. It's unfortunately but trees get old, trees get sick. Sometimes you just need a little bit more light in an area than you're currently getting and taking some branches off the bottom is a good way to handle that. Now some jobs are going to be a little too big for you to handle, but there are a lot of jobs that with the right tools you're going to be able to do the pruning on all yourself and in this case we've got one of those jobs. We've got a branch here down on the bottom and because of the way its been handled by other people over the course of the years, its not in very good shape. You can see over here, somebody went and put a swing on this branch and they didn't do it the right way. They didn't protect the branch, they put chains on there and it's cut into the branch, making the branch unhealthy and killing it. So we've got to take it down. What we're going to do is we're going to start by pruning the ends off the branch. This is going to do a couple of things for us, it's going to make sure one; that I'm not dropping the branch down into a garden or existing structures and two; it's going to take some of the weight off the branch and make it safer and easier to take down. One of the tools that everybody that has a tree in their yard should have is a pole pruner. A pole pruner comes in a couple of different parts, one; there's a saw blade, usually detachable, we'll talk more about that in a minute. The part that we're going to use now is a bypass pruner, operates on a pulley system that can be operated on a long string pulled from the ground. We're going to use that right now to help take some weight off the branch. The next thing we're going to do is start sawing parts off this. Now by bringing it down in sections, I'm making sure it's coming down in smaller more manageable chunks that are a lot less likely to damage to me or my garden."