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ON THE GARDEN PATH
by Carolyn Herriot
Each month, Carolyn writes about what she is doing in the garden, the orchard, the greenhouse, with seed saving and soil building, with the intention of helping gardeners of all levels realize they can have the most healthy, productive, and beautiful garden without resorting to substances harmful to humans, animals, plants, or the myriad of soil-dwelling organisms.
If you have ever put your back out or suffered from tennis elbow or tendonitis, you may want to read on and take note. After a long winter, it's not surprising that gardeners are bursting to get going, but just like plants, we need to come out of dormancy slowly. Here are a few tips to prevent you from regretting your enthusiasm.
- Keep your posture as upright as possible when working in the garden. Bending too much puts a strain on the spine and back muscles. When digging, keep your body upright, and when pushing in the spade, do not bend your back.
- Restrict your exertions to 20 minutes at a time. Then stretch and take a short break.
- When stretching, place your hands on your hips and bend backwards as far as possible, without overdoing it. This puts the back into its normal upright position.
- When lifting and carrying, keep your feet apart for balance, bend the knees to lower yourself and lift the object close to your body. Let the legs do the lifting, not the back.
- Invest in some kneepads, or use a padded mat. Knees can take a beating when it comes to hours of hand weeding.
- Wear strong flexible shoes, which put less strain on calves and heels.
- Invest in padded insoles and wear warm, woolen socks in gumboots. This makes Wellies more comfortable and will insulate your feet against cold and damp.
- If your back is aching or your body is protesting, take a break and treat yourself to a lovely cup of tea.
Proper pruning practice
A good pruning can make an amazing difference to how plants perform. Pruning helps maintain a pleasing shape, encourages vibrant new growth and results in more flowers. Here are some useful snippy tips:
- Make sure your pruning equipment is sharp. Use scissor-type pruning shears rather than an anvil-type to prevent unnecessary injury to plant tissues.
- Never forget: the more you prune, the more it grows.
- The goal is to maintain a healthy, productive tree with an aesthetic shape, in an area open to sunlight.
- To avoid spreading disease among plants, disinfect pruning tools.
- Start by pruning out the three Ds: dead, diseased and damaged.
- Remove one of two crossing branches that are rubbing together.
- Remove branches growing into the centre. Keeping an open growth habit is beneficial for good air circulation and the penetration of sunlight.
- Prune no more than 30 percent at one time. Pruning too heavily will produce water sprouts and an overabundance of soft wood.
- Avoid leaving stubs. Not only are they unsightly, but they also invite disease into the plant as they die back.
- Avoid cutting too close and injuring the main stem/trunk.
- Always prune to an outward facing bud or sideshoot to encourage outward growth.
- Cut immediately above a bud or sideshoot, making a sloped cut away from the bud.
- Allow the plant to heal itself. Nobody uses tar paste over pruning cuts.
- Canopy shaping, or crown raising, should happen early while the tree is young and the branches are thin. Avoid pruning large mature branches unless they have broken after a storm or died from disease.
The general rule of thumb for pruning ornamental shrubs is to do it just after flowering. Spring flowering ornamentals produce blossoms on the previous year's growth, so pruning at the right time is essential. Get to know your plants. If branches have buds on them, pruning now means you'll lose all these flowers. Shrubs such as forsythia, philadelphus, weigela and lilac should be pruned in summer, just after they have flowered.
Keep heathers, lavenders, helianthemums and spireas from getting straggly by shearing them back in summer after they bloom. Take a pair of hedge trimmers and give them a rounded or aesthetically pleasing shape, taking care not to cut into old wood. Off with their dead flowerheads for compact, bushy plants next year. It's rewarding to prune ceanothus (California lilac), escallonias and hebes, as these fast-growing shrubs quickly outgrow their allotted space, and pruning gets them back into scale with the garden.
Early spring is the time to cut back shrubs of Cornus (dogwoods) and Salix (willows). When you prune a branch, these plants respond by sending out two or three sideshoots. Pruned back now, before bud break, to six inches from the ground, Cornus and Salix will respond by throwing out lots of colourful new shoots. It's these sideshoots that provide the main feature for the winter garden.
Keep in mind the two Js when it comes to clipping evergreen hedges and shrubs (e.g. cedars, laurels, cypresses): January and July are the best months to perform this activity. Early in the year, new growth will soften the closely shorn appearance of a newly cut hedge. In July, the new growth that results from trimming will still have time to mature, before the onset of freezing winter conditions that may damage young shoots.
Yew has the rare capacity of regrowing from mature wood. This means that an older hedge can be trimmed back by hard pruning right to the bare trunk. If done now, by midsummer it will be covered with a delectable fuzz of new green shoots. To prevent over stressing overgrown yews, do only one side at a time, and wait a season before pruning the other side. Temporary lopsidedness beats complete destruction!
From A Year on the Garden Path, A 52-Week Organic Gardening Guide by Carolyn Herriot. $29.95. Earthfuture Publications, Victoria, BC. Available from Banyen Books and Duthie Books or
www.earthfuture.com/gardenpath
Carolyn Herriot has been operating The Garden Path Organic Plant Nursery in Victoria since 1989, from which grew her organic seed business, Seeds of Victoria. Carolyn shares her passion for gardening by way of lectures and as a garden writer, and appears weekly on Get Up and Grow and the Go show on Global and CHTV.
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