This is Weed and this is Wack with WOWDY Gardens. We’re an organic gardening show focusing on do it yourself in the garden and do it yourself today means trying to do as little pruning as you possibly can to keep yourself satisfied. And I’m saying that in the form of if you want round bushes in your yard like ones that look like they say they’re shaped like
meatballs this landscape is called this meatballing when you have to prune something it looks like a meatball or you know a ball or or or or something like that something that’s not normally not normally like the normal way it would grow best to choose a plant that would do that naturally on its own so when you’re pruning you have to do just a minimal amount of pruning and not a major amount of pruning it is an art form and to do it properly you don’t want to stress the
plant too much or you’ll ruin everything that’s right I must take a lot of time to do it right it does now folks do topiary and that’s an incredible art on its own and that involves sculpting bush evergreen bushes and and allowing them to get large enough so that you can do the next layer which which is intense well I think of the shining in the giant maze of what kind of yeah
box would yeah probably box would fall box something like that would take decades to grow and absolutely decades to grow in fact I’ve been to Mount Vernon I went out there to check out their hemp field it was in the paper and it was so we went and checked it out and actually checked out their garden and they had topiary fruit trees that were trained
to be the railings in the pathways I love that garden and it was just incredible and those must have taken a good hundred years to train to know like that way I what’s the term it you know the term when you when you ask Pellier yeah I love that so forth taking advantage of it in a warmer colder climate that technique actually allows you to grow stuff that normally wouldn’t grow because a southern facing wall and a plant again
has its own microclimate yeah so there was a reason to do it not just because it’s beautiful that’s right when I was landscaping I had one client that insisted that we prune her azaleas to look like meatballs in a semicircle around her in her front yard around her Ivy and it was by doing this which we did you know I would say religiously every every time we visited which is about
every other week or so gotta do what the client wants it stressed these azaleas beyond belief and because it stressed these azaleas they were attacked by all kinds of bugs all the time so we were constantly fighting these bugs and of course being an organic company you don’t have so many solutions so it’s best to choose a shrub that has a more compact weeping habit and if you like yellow I can think of no better
shrub than the Jasmine new to flora is a weeping shrub with yellow flowers in early spring so that’s my my advice folks choose choose a shrub that has a natural habit of what you want it to be what will help me here I am I don’t know anything about topiary and I planted well 20 years ago boxwoods they were tiny when I got them from the Arbor Day Foundation and
look like little sticks they’re giant now and I want to trim them to look like a hedge and my wife likes them bushy and growing out should they be either way works right yeah you want to shear them you know take like a big pair of scissors you know she’s or a gas you know electric not a gas pair but electric power hedge trimmer mm-hmm and then
shape them you know only by taking off no more than say four inches well the outer growth you want to make sure it stays green cutting it back you want to cut back to still well when I trim it I find it hard to make it flat on top as almost as if I need to put up a level line to you know because it seems to get all crooked yeah well it helps to have your apparatus that you’re standing on as level as possible right anyway but they’re
also helps to have someone look stand in the back right and only trimming off four inches at a time would help keep it more even then I was taken off much more you can take off four inch down on one side and leave the other side up to try and even it out there but Azalea is not the thing that comes to mind for for trimming although the deer are doing a pretty good job right now I like the natural way that is it is grow into each other and there are different colors well what was the name of the
shrub that you recommend using four if you for with a compact weeping habit that’s jasmine new to flora and that would be in place of say a meatball type shape that’s right and that would have a yellow flower right so so it’s a natural a natural meatball type of meatball shaped bush cool cool I’ve learned a lot about how to take care of my hedges
and never prune your evergreen shrubs after September 1st because pruning them encourages new growth and we don’t you don’t want any new growth when when you could get a frost right so even though we could probably push that back to you know October 1st we could always get an early frost in October even though we haven’t in at least two decades right
but yeah you when you prune back evergreen when you put back anything it encourages it to grow if you prune back in a deciduous plant in the wintertime when it’s dormant that it’s not gonna grow but if you prune back an evergreen in the wintertime it will grow because it’s always thinking about growing there and has leaves there so you never want to prune back an evergreen where it’s getting close to wintertime because you don’t want that new growth to freeze before it hardens off
so what do we learn today prune if you’re gonna prune prune prune early and if you need to prune choose a shrub that you don’t have to prune that much of and don’t what take four inches of take any more than four inches off your evergreen shrubs whether they be boxwoods or use mm-hmm or false cypress or whatever right there I could go
on there’s at least a couple dozen different types of evergreens out there yeah and there’s probably different shrubs that are to be trimmed at different times of years as a year as well well I’m saying it was an evergreen shrub you don’t want to prune it after September 1st right wait wait till the spring of course you wouldn’t want to trim your resilience until you get your your blooms in that’s right and for hydrangeas you need to know what type of hand hydrangeas you have because there are five
types in the area three of them bloom on current year’s growth and two of them bloom on last year’s growth so you don’t want to cut your hydrangeas back drastically I’ve seen a lot of that done and obviously they didn’t know what they were doing yeah I didn’t know that anyway folks goodbye from Weed and Whack we’ll be back join us next week we’ll be back