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Tips for Pruning Trees and Bushes
from: Lawn and Garden MagicPruning and trimming a bush or tree helps it stay healthier. In fact, many bushes and trees will grow like crazy once they've been properly pruned, and if they produce flowers, you may actually get many more blooms than usual after a trim as well.
Trimming is important for the bush or tree's health and vitality, but it's also very important for general safety. Leaving a dead branch on a tree in a residential area could potentially invite harm to your house, your vehicles, or your friends and family because that dead branch will eventually fall to the ground -- or whatever is underneath of it.
Many gardeners are afraid to trim or prune their own bushes because they're worried they may somehow damage or kill the plant. Trimming is quite safe, and as mentioned, it's actually needed for the health of your tree. As long as you don't prune too much off at any given time, your plants will do just fine. If you're nervous about trimming, then just start slowly with very small changes. As you become more at ease with the trimming and pruning process, you'll feel better about doing what's required.
Trimming and pruning should be done in the winter when the plants are dormant, around January or February, just before the first blush of spring flowers comes out in your area.
The first thing you'll need to do is cut away any dead branches from your bushes. If the bush has extensive dead parts though, it's not usually good to cut them away all at once. Rather, do a little more each year over the course of several years.
If there are any areas of your bushes which look like they're diseased or have major health problems, you generally want to cut these away as well so that the rest of your bush will not become infected.
Once dead or diseased branches are cut away, take a step back and look at the bush or tree in full. Determine if there are any branches which appear problematic or wrong in some way. There may be an errant branch which is growing the wrong direction for instance, or there may be new shoots which are encroaching into areas they're not supposed to. Or you may simply want to neaten up the overall shape a little bit. If so, trim brances as needed for the desired results.
When pruning and trimming, use sharp cutting tools. Each cut you make should be clean and smooth. If your tools aren't sharp then you'll find yourself breaking and splitting remaining branch parts, and this causes stress and injury to the bush.
If you want your bushes to bush out a bit and become fuller looking, then make your pruning cuts just past a "knuckle" or "joint" in the branch. This usually causes new shoots to form on either side of the knuckle when the bush wakes up in the spring.
Once you're finished pruning and trimming, keep an eye on the bushes when spring starts, because you might be astonished at just how fast they start growing and blooming!
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