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Tips for dry weather gardening

When the weather’s dry it’s useful to check over your garden and see if a few well-placed cuts will improve the look and health of your plants.
Grapevine
Thinned-down grapevine will produce grapes with access to sunshine for ripeness, and also air to deter molds and rots.

 

When the weather’s dry it’s useful to check over your garden and see if a few well-placed cuts will improve the look and health of your plants.

For instance, as soon as winter heather quits blooming, it’s time to give it a trim all over to make room for fresh, new growth.

Afterwards, heather always appreciates some compost and peat spread around its roots, too.

Witchhazel seldom needs any pruning of its main branches, but suckers below the graft can constantly recur and be a major issue.

They should be dealt with immediately, as you see them by pulling them off the main trunk. Use pliers for this.

The winter jasmine (Jasminium nudiflorum) has usually stopped flowering when February gets under way. That’s when it’s best to cut side branches back to the main stems.

If not, it will flop all around in a mass of creeping green, spreading out long branches and rooting where it touches.

For people with big gardens, winter jasmine is a lovely ground-cover plant for a slope where it can quickly cover the whole area and give flowers all winter. Used like this, it doesn’t need pruning at all.

For grapes, you need to cut everything down to one trunk with two branches each side (all four will grow and fruit later this year) and also two stubs (two on each side, which will be branches the following year).

It’s a lot of work, but the thinned-down grapevine will produce grapes with access to sunshine for ripeness, and also air to deter molds and rots.

It’s also good to check any fruit trees as you pass by. Winter gales may have broken or roughed up some branches, and any dead or diseased ones should be cut out.

Where two branches are trying to share the same space, the weaker one should be removed.

Sunshine and air penetrate best when some of the branches pointing to the centre of the tree are taken out.

This should be encouraged by always pruning so that the top (dominant) bud in a branch is on the outside.

Also while you have your pruners out, it’s a good idea to cut back any fall flowering clematis such as Clematis.

Email gardening questions to amarrison@shaw.ca.