GARDEN POSSABILITIES SERVICES Home Page, Shrub Pruning time is here.


	Over 20 year’s experience with perennial plants & gardens. Welcome to GARDEN POSSIBILITIES!, where we're not only passionate about gardens, plants, and gardening, but also about gardeners - teaching you to see and understand more fully the fascinating and creative playground in your own backyard. Whether it's through just a one hour on-site consultation; the many in-depth articles here on the web site; or attending one of our comprehensive gardening classes or public seminars, we can help you understand more about what's going on in your garden so you can make personally stylish, environmentally friendly, by-passer eye-popping, and common-sense decisions for yourself. Call or email anytime for more information on how we can help you ... ... achieve a unique garden that thrives with beauty, grace and your personal touch. Evelyn Wolf		April 6th, 2009 Outside My Window The main snow cover melted very early this year and temperatures have been much warmer than usual for late March / early April. Dormant buds on your woody plants are stirring and will be ready to fly into growth as soon as this last little taste of winter passes. This week we're getting that predictable return to something more resembling winter than spring, but the forecasts aren't calling for anything near as cold as we sometimes get at this time. Some shrubs break bud earlier than others, but whatever their growth pattern is... ...Now is a great time for pruning! Details of exactly how to prune which shrub is something that
	comes with a bit of research on the plant and how it grows, and mostly, comes with experience. In a nutshell, pruning is not a straightforward chopping off of the outer branches. That only weakens the blooming power and ruins the branching pattern. Each shrub has it's own growth habit and bloom time that should be taken into consideration and there is always your own, the plant's, or the garden site's, unique reason for pruning in a particular way. Most flowering shrub problems begin and end with incorrect pruning. Aside from removing dead or damaged branches, if in doubt about how and when to prune - don't! The shrub will likely be better off. Take a bit of time to research correct shrub pruning on the web - there's lots of great information there. Or, if you can wait a bit, register for an in-depth pruning workshop I'll be running in late April at Van Bakel's Greenhouse on Mount Albert Rd. Correct shrub pruning is one of the gardening skills to master if you're ever to achieve a healthy, beautiful garden, so time spent learning how to do it correctly will be well worth it. I'll be booking shrub pruning appointments starting March 23rd, so contact me soon if your shrubs need a bit of experienced TLC. Often just one hour in April and a follow-up hour later in the season is all that's necessary to keep your shrubs healthy and looking great. Happy spring! Evelyn The very popular Weeping Mulberry requires frequent pruning to clean out all the dead branches within it's canopy. It is such a fast growing, weak wooded, plant that it becomes an impenetrable mess if left for too many years and often develop disease where branches are trapped and crushed between each other. They can be cut right back to just a dozen of the healthiest branches with great success and become gorgeous sculptural things with a skilled nip and tuck each spring. Don't be afraid to cut it right back to clean it out. It will respond with an explosion of growth!